Richard Michod

Richard E. Michod is an American evolutionary biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Arizona, known for his work on evolutionary transitions in individuality — the processes by which groups of previously independent replicators become new, higher-level individuals.

Evolutionary transitions and fitness

Michod’s research program treats the origin of the cell, the multicellular organism and sexual populations as instances of a single problem: how cooperation among lower-level units emerges, how defection within the group is suppressed, and how fitness is transferred and reorganized from the level of the parts to the level of the whole. In this framework, an evolutionary transition