Major Evolutionary Transition

Description

Clement Vidal:

"METs depict the few moments in the history of life where radical novelty and change has happened. These include the origin of life itself, eukaryote cells, multicellular organisms, sexual reproduction, cultural transmission, mental modelling and, as a growing number of evolutionary scientists are recognizing and debating, the emergence of a kind of planetary superorganism.

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The core challenge for an MET to succeed is that it has to solve the cooperation barrier (Stewart, 2000). This requires the emergence of a new metasystem that can deploy control mechanisms suppressing free-riding and promoting cooperative processes (Turchin, 1977). Obviously, the specific implementation of such control mechanisms varies with each transition. Once the cooperation barrier is solved, division of labour can start, and matter–energy distribution (the distributor in Living Systems Theory) and information flows (channel and net in LST) need to be present to coordinate the differentiated parts."

(https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/sres.2997)