| Preface | p. xi |
| From natural selection to the history of nature | p. 1 |
| Nature after natural law | p. 2 |
| Reductionism and emergence | p. 4 |
| History and inheritance | p. 7 |
| Darwinian progress: order at the macroevolutionary scale | p. 10 |
| Macroevolution as history | p. 12 |
| Contingency as the startling consensus | p. 15 |
| Convergence | p. 18 |
| The denial of 'progress': Darwinism's prejudice against Darwin | p. 20 |
| Biological complexity and information | p. 22 |
| Organisms as DNA programs | p. 25 |
| Major transitions: the aggregational mode of evolution | p. 27 |
| Convergent aggregation, levels of selection and levels of organisation | p. 30 |
| The evolution of biological order | p. 32 |
| The evolution of order: macroevolutionary consequences | p. 35 |
| From the units of inheritance to the origin of species | p. 38 |
| The gene as the module of inheritance | p. 40 |
| The fundamental principle of natural selection | p. 43 |
| Gradualism: the cost of biological complexity | p. 46 |
| The adaptive walk in the real world | p. 51 |
| Epistasis as a main legacy of particulate inheritance | p. 55 |
| The shifting balance and the structure of real populations | p. 58 |
| Sex and the origins of species | p. 60 |
| Speciation as adaptation: the evolution of xenophobia | p. 62 |
| Speciation as an accident | p. 65 |
| Speciation and particulate inheritance | p. 67 |
| Levels of selection | p. 69 |
| Multicellularity and the developmental code | p. 72 |
| Replication and reproduction | p. 75 |
| Gene expression | p. 77 |
| Multicellularity and the developmental code | p. 79 |
| From gene expression to morphological pattern | p. 82 |
| Regulatory regions and gene bureaucracy | p. 84 |
| Is evolution mostly the evolution of regulatory regions? | p. 86 |
| Modularity and microevolution | p. 90 |
| The gradual evolution of homeotic mutations | p. 93 |
| The origin of animal phyla | p. 97 |
| The challenge of multicellularity | p. 99 |
| Life cycle evolution: life and death of the soma | p. 102 |
| Weismann's two insights | p. 104 |
| Fisher's second fundamental principle | p. 106 |
| Medawar and accidental death | p. 109 |
| Williams and the logic of trade-offs | p. 111 |
| Hamiltion: senescence beyond mortality and the return of the killer genes | p. 114 |
| Growth and fitness | p. 117 |
| The reproduction of soma: energy, time and trade-offs | p. 119 |
| The end of reproduction: menopause and senescence | p. 122 |
| Free radicals and molecular signalling | p. 124 |
| Conclusion: multicellularity and the life cycle | p. 126 |
| Sex and its consequences: the transition that never happened | p. 128 |
| The misleading cost of sex | p. 132 |
| Advantage of genetic exchange | p. 134 |
| The origin of separate sexes | p. 137 |
| Too many males | p. 140 |
| Sexual selection | p. 143 |
| Why sexual dimorphism? | p. 144 |
| Male ornaments as accidents | p. 147 |
| Ornaments: animal signals of fitness | p. 149 |
| The phylogeny of sex and asex | p. 150 |
| Sex and biological complexity | p. 152 |
| Animal societies: the case of incomplete evolutionary transitions | p. 154 |
| The problem of co-operation | p. 158 |
| Relatedness as the origin of true altruism | p. 160 |
| Limitations of kin selection theory | p. 165 |
| Selfish co-operation: an eye for an eye, a helping hand for a helping hand | p. 168 |
| The conditions for selfish co-operation | p. 171 |
| The birth of the selfless ape | p. 173 |
| Scratching the strong reciprocator | p. 179 |
| Conclusion: animal societies and biological complexity | p. 183 |
| The new 'Chain of Being': hierarchical evolution and biological complexity | p. 186 |
| Thermodynamics versus biological information | p. 187 |
| Schrödinger's Principle and the evolution of order | p. 188 |
| The historical transformation of selection | p. 197 |
| The hierarchical nature of macroevolution | p. 201 |
| Historical humans: the technological code and the end of evolution | p. 203 |
| Hierarchical evolution and the roots of Darwinism | p. 205 |
| References | p. 208 |
| Index | p. 233 |
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