ArticleProceedings. Biological sciences2020
Operationalizing evolutionary transitions in individuality.
Article in Proceedings. Biological sciences, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
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Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- A New Classification Framework to Understand Evolutionary Transitions in Individuality.BioEssays : news and reviews in molecular, cellular and developmental biology · 2026Review
- Major transitions in sociocultural evolution.Evolutionary human sciences · 2025Article
- Multiple distinct evolutionary mechanisms govern the dynamics of selfish mitochondrial genomes in Caenorhabditis elegans.Nature communications · 2024Article
- Resource adaptation drives the size-complexity rule in termites.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Human societal development: is it an evolutionary transition in individuality?Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Review
- Human socio-cultural evolution in light of evolutionary transitions: introduction to the theme issue.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The transition from animal to human culture-simulating the social protocell hypothesis.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2023Article
- The weird eusociality of polyembryonic parasites.Biology letters · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Evolutionary transitions in individuality (hereafter, ETIs), such as the transition to multi-cellularity and the transition to social colonies, have been at the centre of evolutionary research, but only few attempts were made to systematically operationalize this concept. Here, we devise a set of four indicators intended to assess the change in complexity during ETIs: system size, inseparability, reproductive specialization and non-reproductive specialization. We then conduct a quantitative comparison across multiple taxa and ETIs. Our analysis reveals that inseparability has a crucial role in the process; it seems irreversible and may mark the point where a group of individuals becomes a new individual at a higher hierarchical level. Interestingly, we find that disparate groups demonstrate a similar pattern of progression along ETIs.
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Registered trials
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