Eörs Szathmáry - Major Evolutionary Transitions and AGI's Impact (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 7)

This is Daniel Fagelli. You're tuned in to The Trajectory. This is the seventh episode of Stewarding the Flame, where we talk about what it would look like to encourage the flourishing of the greater living process of which humanity is a temporary part, which may be unfolding and unfurling beyond us. Our guest this week is Ios Safmari. He is one of the co-creators of the Major Transitions in Evolution Framework, along with John Maynard Smith, who's no longer with us. Ios teaches at Hungary's Center for Ecological Research and is a leading kind of theoretical biologist. The Major Transitions in Evolution Framework highlights how key jumps in the evolutionary process had to do not just with a new body plan or a new capability, but with things that used to be individual components bubbling up to become larger collectives, which then act in the interest of that greater pattern. And as you'll discover in this particular episode, it may be the case that we're going through another one of those right now. There is no one with, I think, a cleaner view of sort of what these pops in fundamental shifts of the regime of power and intelligence on planet Earth is beyond EORS, given the nature of his research and the fact that he's also studied AI. So I've got a lot of comments for the end of this episode. As usual, I'll save them for the end of this episode. Without further ado, let's fly into the meat and potatoes. This is Eeyore Sathmari here on The Trajectory. Glad to be able to dive in here and get into this broader question of stewarding the flame. You and I have had some interesting philosophical discourse off the microphone, and now we get to dive right into it. But I want to make sure that the audience, and even myself, gets a refined initial view of an idea that you're one of the developers of that I think is rather important, of major transitions in evolution. When you explain this to sort of folks with different kinds of scientific backgrounds who may be unfamiliar with evolutionary biology, what's your tertiary definition that we're going to kind of poke around and get a little bit more nuance on it?

Evolution is arguably more than just, you know, one form of gene replacing another. It's more exciting than that. It's about the evolution of organizations and levels of organization throughout the almost 4 billion years of evolution. And together with the late John Maynard Smith we identified a number of really very serious steps as they were in the origin and evolution of life, whereby a number of things you can identify again and again. So one is that a higher level unit of evolution is being formed from lower level ones, right? The second important aspect that new ways of storing, using, and transmitting hereditary information arises. Usually they go hand in hand. Then we identified something about eight major transitions in 1995. There was a revision since then, but these two things are common things, you know, formation of higher level units and also novel ways of dealing with different kinds of hereditary information. And while you are doing this in evolution, you know, along the lines, the lineages where it happens, complexity does actually