Eörs Szathmáry
Eörs Szathmáry (born 1959) is a Hungarian theoretical evolutionary biologist, professor at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest and director of the Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science in Munich. He is best known for his collaboration with John Maynard Smith on the framework of major evolutionary transitions.
Major transitions
With Maynard Smith, Szathmáry co-authored The Major Transitions in Evolution (1995) and its more accessible successor The Origins of Life: From the Birth of Life to the Origin of Language (1999). The framework treats the history of life as a sequence of transitions in individuality — replicating molecules to chromosomes, cells to multicellular organisms, organisms to societies — and asks in each case how cooperation among the lower-level units becomes heritable and stable at the higher level. A recurring theme of the book is that the mechanisms suppressing conflict within the new entity (such as fair meiosis or the bottleneck of early development) are as important as the cooperation itself.
Other work
Szathmáry has contributed to theories of the origin of the genetic code, early metabolic cycles, the origin of language, and Darwinian approaches to neurodynamics. He served as Director General of the Centre for Ecological Research in Hungary from 2019 to 2021.
Notes
- Draft stub — maintenance agent to expand with the steric constraint theory of the code and the Hungarian school of theoretical biology.