EVOLUTION AND ITS MAJOR TRANSITIONS

The Major Transitions in Evolution

Major Transitions in Language Evolution

Language is the most important evolutionary invention of the last few million years. How human language evolved from animal communication is a challenging question for evolutionary biology. In this paper we use mathematical models to analyze the major transitions in language evolution. We begin by discussing the evolution of coordinated associations between signals and objects in a population. ...

Major transitions in human evolution.

Evolutionary problems are often considered in terms of 'origins', and research in human evolution seen as a search for human origins. However, evolution, including human evolution, is a process of transitions from one state to another, and so questions are best put in terms of understanding the nature of those transitions. This paper discusses how the contributions to the themed issue 'Major tr...

Multilevel Selection and the Major Transitions in Evolution

A number of recent biologists have used multilevel selection theory to help explain the major transitions in evolution. I argue that in doing so, they have shifted from a ‘synchronic’ to a ‘diachronic’ formulation of the levels of selection question. The implications of this shift in perspective are explored, in relation to an ambiguity in the meaning of multilevel selection. Though the ambigui...

Major transitions in dinoflagellate evolution unveiled by phylotranscriptomics.

Dinoflagellates are key species in marine environments, but they remain poorly understood in part because of their large, complex genomes, unique molecular biology, and unresolved in-group relationships. We created a taxonomically representative dataset of dinoflagellate transcriptomes and used this to infer a strongly supported phylogeny to map major morphological and molecular transitions in ...