Event:

Complexity in the living world (by whatever measure) has considerably increased thanks to a small number of processes that are now called the major evolutionary transitions. Two important components of these transitions is the emergence of evolutionary units from lower-level ones, and the evoltuion of new ways of storing, expressing and transmitting hereditary information. The impressive body of work on the major evolutionary transitions in the last 29 years has kept this intriguing topic very much alive. Multilevel selection, first without, then with, the collectives in focus is an important explanatory mechanism. After the transition, units show strong cooperation and very limited realized conflict. The origins of cells, the emergence of the genetic code and translation, the evolution of the eukaryotic cell, multicellularity, and the origin of human groups with language are are under close strutiny in the light of new models. Some of the transitions can be recursive (e.g., plastids, multicellularity) or limited (transitions that share the usual features of major transitions without a massive phylogenetic impact, such as the micro- and macronuclei in ciliates). Some important open probems will be highlighted.