Nearly half of the animal phyla contain species that propagate asexually via agametic
reproduction, often forming colonies of genetically identical modules, that is, ramets, zooids …

Drawing on recent advances in evolutionary biology, prominent scholars return to the
question posed in a pathbreaking book: how evolution itself evolved. In 1995, John Maynard …

Power is omnipresent in human society—it is coveted, fought over, and fiercely protected. In
the last two decades, investigators have made significant strides in understanding how …

Individuals are a prominent part of the biological world. Although biologists and
philosophers of biology draw freely on the concept of an individual in articulating both widely …

The objective of first part of this chapter is to lay the groundwork for a hierarchical theory of
power. We begin with basic assumptions. We then review a fundamental, two-part dispute …

How shall we understand apparently teleological systems? What explains their persistence
(returning to past trajectories following errors) and their plasticity (finding the same trajectory …

Ilya Prigogine's trinomial concept is, he argued, applicable to many complex dissipative
systems, from physics to biology and even to social systems. For Prigogine, this trinomial …

We investigate the effects of trophic lifestyle and two types of major evolutionary transitions
in individuality—the endosymbiotic acquisition of organelles and development of …

The 'major transitions in evolution'are mainly about the rise of hierarchy, new individuals
arising at ever higher levels of nestedness, in particular the eukaryotic cell arising from …

The transition to multicellularity is perhaps the best-studied of the “major evolutionary
transitions”. It has occurred independently multiple times within the eukaryotes alone, and …