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