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 …

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 '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 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 …

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

In Mark Twain's Letters from the Earth, his sardonic alter ego Puddin'head Wilson reflects
that if the Eiffel Tower represented the history of the world, and the skin of paint atop the …

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 …

The history of life seems to be characterized by three large-scale trends in complexity:(1) the
rise in complexity in the sense of hierarchy, in other words, an increase in the number of …