Chapter 3 — The Major Transitions of Evolution
When Separate Things Become Something More
The history of evolution is often presented as a succession of species. One organism changes, divides into new forms, competes with others, and either survives or disappears. This description is correct, but incomplete. Some of evolution’s most consequential events did not occur simply because one species became better adapted. They occurred because entities that had once existed independently entered a new form of cooperation and became parts of a larger organized whole.
Individual molecules became integrated systems of inheritance. Separate genes became organized within chromosomes. Simpler cells entered permanent relationships and contributed to more complex cells. Independent cells formed multicellular organisms. Individual organisms created societies with divisions of labor. Human minds became connected through language, culture, institutions, and technological networks.
At every such transition, a new level of organization appeared.
The components did not necessarily vanish. Cells remain alive within a body. Individual humans remain conscious within a society. But once integration crossed a certain threshold, the larger system acquired capabilities unavailable to any component acting alone.
A neuron cannot write a book. A single cell cannot walk across a room. One person cannot construct a global scientific civilization. Yet organized networks of neurons, cells, and people can accomplish these things.
This pattern is known as a major evolutionary transition. It is essential to the Infinous hypothesis because Infinous is not proposed merely as a more powerful civilization. It may represent another transition in the scale at which intelligence becomes organized.
Biological humans, uploaded persons, artificial intelligences, institutions, machines, and digital worlds may eventually become participants in a larger evolutionary system. If such a transition occurs, it will create possibilities that none of these participants could realize independently.
But integration alone is not enough. A pile is not an organism. A crowd is not necessarily a civilization. A network is not automatically a mind. A major transition requires a new architecture of information, cooperation, specialization, and continuity.
The Architecture of a Transition
Although major evolutionary transitions differ greatly, several recurring features can be identified.
First, units capable of existing or reproducing separately begin cooperating. The cooperation may initially be temporary and unstable. Each participant still pursues its own continuation, and exploitation remains possible.
Second, the participants develop specialization. Different units perform different tasks, increasing the efficiency and capability of the whole. Specialization also creates dependence: a unit that becomes highly effective at one function may lose the ability to survive independently.
Third, new channels of information emerge. The components must detect one another, coordinate activity, transmit instructions, and respond to changing conditions. Without information, cooperation cannot become organized.
Fourth, the system develops mechanisms for controlling internal conflict. Some participants may benefit by taking resources without contributing, reproducing without restraint, or manipulating the larger organization. Unless such behavior is limited, the cooperative system collapses.
Fifth, the higher-level system acquires a degree of identity and agency. It can maintain itself, respond to threats, reproduce its organization, and act upon the environment as a unit.
Finally, the transition opens a new space of possibilities. The larger system can perform actions, inhabit environments, or create structures unavailable at the previous level.
These features can be summarized as a repeating movement:
integration → specialization → communication → conflict control → higher-level agency → expanded possibility
This is not an automatic sequence. Most attempts at cooperation remain temporary. Many integrations fail. Some become parasitic, unstable, or excessively rigid. A major transition occurs only when the new organization becomes sufficiently coherent to persist.
The survival of the larger system then begins to shape the evolution of its parts.
From Competing Molecules to Organized Inheritance
Before cellular life, the earliest self-replicating systems—whatever their precise form—would have faced a basic problem. Information needed to be preserved, reproduced, and expressed, but isolated molecular replicators would have competed for resources and undergone frequent errors.
Greater complexity required cooperation among informational components. Genes do not normally function as completely independent entities. They exist within organized systems where different sequences contribute to different aspects of a shared organism. Chromosomes link genes into larger structures of inheritance, allowing coordinated transmission across generations.
This arrangement creates advantages, but it also introduces conflict. A genetic element may reproduce in ways that benefit itself while harming the organism. Biological systems therefore develop mechanisms that regulate replication, repair damage, suppress disruptive elements, and coordinate gene expression.
The genome is not a peaceful parliament in which every component possesses identical interests. It is an evolved order that maintains sufficient cooperation for the organism to persist.
This is an early lesson of major transitions: unity does not require the complete disappearance of conflict. It requires institutions—biological or otherwise—capable of preventing internal conflict from destroying the larger system.
The same problem will later appear in multicellular organisms, human societies, artificial intelligence networks, and Infinous.
The Complex Cell
One of the most important transitions in the history of life may have begun through an intimate relationship between previously independent cells.
The complex cells composing animals, plants, fungi, and many other organisms contain structures such as mitochondria. These energy-producing components are understood to have originated from bacteria that entered into a lasting association with another cell. Over evolutionary time, the relationship became so integrated that the former bacteria could no longer live independently in their ancestral form.
What began as coexistence became interdependence. The host cell received a more effective source of usable energy. The internal partner received protection and resources. Genes were transferred, functions became specialized, and control became increasingly coordinated. A new kind of cell emerged whose capabilities exceeded those of either ancestral participant.
This transition was not simply one organism consuming another. It was the creation of a new organizational level through integration.
The complex cell demonstrates that evolutionary advancement does not always occur through the elimination of competitors. Sometimes the most transformative outcome is incorporation: former rivals become indispensable parts of a higher-order system.
This principle should not be romanticized. Integration may involve domination, loss of autonomy, or irreversible dependence. The earlier independent forms do not necessarily enter the new arrangement through anything resembling consent. Biological evolution does not follow ethical procedures.
Future intelligent integration will be different because conscious participants can evaluate the terms under which they cooperate. A transition involving persons cannot be justified merely because it increases the power of the whole. It must also confront autonomy, rights, continuity, and the freedom not to participate.
Biological history shows how integration becomes possible. It does not tell us how conscious integration should be governed.
The Multicellular Revolution
For much of life’s history, cells existed as independent organisms. Multicellularity introduced another profound transition: cells began living and reproducing as parts of larger bodies.
A multicellular organism requires more than cells remaining physically close together. Its cells must communicate, specialize, coordinate growth, distribute resources, repair damage, and respond collectively to threats.
Some cells become muscle, others nerve, bone, blood, or skin. Most surrender the possibility of independent reproduction. Their continuation becomes tied to the survival and reproduction of the organism.
Specialization greatly expands capability. A single cell cannot develop eyes, wings, hands, or a brain. A coordinated body can move through complex environments, pursue distant goals, learn, communicate, and transform its surroundings.
Yet multicellularity also creates the problem of internal rebellion.
Cancer can be understood, in part, as a breakdown of multicellular cooperation. Cells begin proliferating according to their local reproductive advantage while damaging the organism whose systems support them. What benefits the uncontrolled cell lineage in the short term threatens the entire body, including the cells themselves.
Multicellular life therefore depends on mechanisms that regulate growth, detect abnormal behavior, remove damaged cells, and protect the integrity of the organism.
The analogy to civilization is unavoidable. Individuals, corporations, political factions, governments, and artificial systems may pursue local objectives that undermine the system upon which their own survival depends. Short-term success at a lower level can produce long-term failure at the higher level.
A civilization capable of reaching Infinous must become exceptionally effective at identifying these conflicts across scales. It must allow experimentation, competition, and individuality without permitting any actor to acquire the power to destroy the shared conditions of existence.
Too little freedom produces stagnation. Too little coordination produces collapse.
The stability of higher-order life exists between these dangers.
Nervous Systems and Unified Action
Multicellular organisms created another challenge: how can many specialized components respond rapidly as one?
Chemical signaling can coordinate activity, but complex movement and behavior require fast integration. Nervous systems emerged as architectures for transmitting information across the body, combining signals, and coordinating action.
A nervous system does not merely connect cells. It establishes relationships among perception, internal state, memory, and behavior. Different parts of the organism contribute information, but the organism acts as a unified agent.
This unity is not absolute. The brain contains competing processes, parallel systems, unconscious mechanisms, and partially independent functions. What we experience as one decision may emerge from negotiation among many internal tendencies.
Yet the organism achieves sufficient integration to maintain a coherent relationship with the environment. It can pursue prey, avoid danger, care for offspring, explore, and learn.
A brain therefore illustrates a form of plural unity. Billions of cells participate in the production of an organism-level perspective and agency. The larger self is not identical to any individual neuron, but neither is it separate from the organized activity of those neurons.
This raises a question that will become increasingly important: can a comparable higher-order agency emerge from networks of intelligent beings?
A society already possesses some organism-like properties. It gathers information, stores memory, distributes resources, defends boundaries, constructs infrastructure, and responds to threats. But it does not possess the same degree of integration as a biological organism, and it should not necessarily attempt to.
Human individuals are conscious centers of experience with their own values and rights. Neurons are not known to possess independent lives comparable to persons. A civilization that tried to coordinate humans as completely as a brain coordinates neurons would likely become totalitarian.
Infinous cannot simply reproduce the architecture of a biological organism at a larger scale. It must discover a new kind of integration appropriate to autonomous minds.
Social Organisms and the Division of Labor
Some of the clearest examples of higher-order coordination appear in social insects. Colonies of ants, bees, or termites can display complex collective behavior even when no individual possesses a complete plan.
Different members perform specialized roles. Chemical and behavioral signals coordinate work. Colonies construct elaborate environments, allocate labor, defend themselves, regulate temperature, and respond adaptively to changing conditions.
The colony can appear organism-like. Its members function as parts of a distributed system whose collective capacities exceed the intelligence of any individual insect.
This has encouraged comparisons between biological colonies and human civilization. But the comparison has limits. Human beings possess richer individuality, reflective selfhood, personal memory, moral status, and the ability to question collective goals.
A human society cannot be ethically justified merely by its efficiency as a superorganism.
Nevertheless, social species reveal important mechanisms of collective intelligence. Complex coordination does not always require a central controller. Local interactions can produce organized global behavior. Information can be distributed across a network. Specialized agents can cooperate without understanding the whole system.
Modern civilization already depends on this principle. No single person knows how to manufacture every component of a computer, operate the entire electrical grid, manage the global food system, and reproduce all scientific knowledge. Society functions through distributed competence.
The danger is that distributed systems can become powerful without becoming understandable. Their outcomes may emerge from countless local decisions, leaving no individual responsible for the whole. Financial crises, environmental damage, information cascades, and technological arms races can arise even when most participants pursue locally reasonable goals.
Collective intelligence is therefore not automatically collective wisdom.
A system may be capable of accomplishing extraordinary tasks while remaining unable to examine its own direction.
Language and the Connection of Minds
Human language produced a transition unlike any previous biological development. It allowed minds to exchange structured representations of objects, events, intentions, rules, and possibilities.
An animal can signal danger. A human can describe a danger that occurred decades earlier, explain why it happened, compare it with an imaginary event, and propose a plan for preventing its recurrence.
Language allows thought to leave the individual without leaving biology entirely. One mind encodes an idea into symbols, and another reconstructs a related idea through interpretation.
The transfer is imperfect. Meanings shift, memories distort, and different minds interpret the same words differently. Yet language makes cooperative cognition possible. People can divide intellectual labor, correct one another, combine perspectives, and build explanations too complex for one person to create alone.
Language also makes collective identity possible. Communities organize themselves through shared stories, obligations, classifications, and expectations. Laws, currencies, borders, offices, contracts, and institutions exist partly because people communicate and recognize them.
These structures become causally powerful. A legal decision can move resources, restrict behavior, or alter millions of lives. An institution may persist for centuries despite the replacement of every person within it.
Human civilization thus creates forms of continuity that exceed biological lifetimes.
The emergence of language did not merge individual minds, but it connected them into cultural systems. Human beings retained private experience while participating in shared informational worlds.
This may provide a more appropriate model for Infinous than the biological superorganism. Integration need not eliminate interior boundaries. Minds can remain distinct while gaining access to shared knowledge, collective projects, and interoperable systems.
The challenge is to deepen coordination without destroying privacy, autonomy, or meaningful difference.
Writing and External Memory
Oral cultures can preserve substantial knowledge, but living memory has limits. Information changes during transmission, depends on human recollection, and may disappear when communities are disrupted.
Writing created an external memory system. Information could now persist without continuous biological rehearsal. A message could travel farther than its author and remain available after the author’s death. Laws could be stabilized, transactions recorded, histories compared, and complex calculations preserved.
Writing altered the scale at which civilization could operate. Larger institutions became manageable because obligations, inventories, decisions, and identities could be recorded. Knowledge accumulated more reliably because each generation did not need to begin again.
Printing accelerated this transition by making replication cheaper and more accurate. Libraries created distributed repositories of cultural memory. Scientific publication allowed observations to be examined by distant communities. Education became a process of connecting new minds to accumulated knowledge.
Digital storage extended external memory further. Vast quantities of information became searchable, copyable, and globally accessible. Human civilization began creating something resembling a planetary memory, though fragmented across institutions, languages, ownership systems, and technical formats.
Artificial intelligence changes external memory once again. A book stores information but does not reorganize itself in response to a question. An AI system can locate patterns, translate, summarize, compare, generate, and interact. Cultural memory becomes increasingly active.
This is another feature of major transitions: information channels do not merely increase in volume. They change the possible organization of the system.
Institutions as Higher-Order Organisms
Institutions allow human cooperation to persist beyond personal relationships.
A family, school, company, court, government, university, or scientific organization coordinates people through roles, rules, records, incentives, and shared expectations. Individuals enter and leave, but the institutional pattern can continue.
Institutions create specialized functions. They preserve knowledge, distribute authority, train new participants, and maintain procedures. In doing so, they acquire limited forms of agency. A company can own property, enter contracts, pursue strategies, and survive its founders. A government can act across generations. A scientific field can retain methods and questions beyond the lives of its members.
But institutions can also become disconnected from the purposes for which they were created. Procedures may protect themselves rather than serve their original goals. Organizations may conceal failure, concentrate power, or treat people as replaceable components.
Once again, the larger system is not automatically wiser than its parts.
Human civilization has not solved the problem of higher-level agency. It has created many competing systems—states, markets, religions, corporations, militaries, networks, and international institutions—each with partial authority and different goals.
Their interaction produces global outcomes without a unified global mind.
This fragmented structure has advantages. Competing institutions can limit one another, preserve diversity, and allow experimentation. But fragmentation becomes dangerous when destructive power operates globally while governance remains local.
Climate change, nuclear weapons, engineered pathogens, financial contagion, and artificial intelligence do not respect political boundaries. Humanity increasingly creates problems at a planetary scale without possessing reliable planetary coordination.
A major transition may be approaching because the existing level of organization is no longer sufficient to control the powers it has produced.
The Planetary Network
Electronic communication has connected humanity at a speed and scale previously impossible.
Billions of people can exchange information through global networks. Satellites observe the planet. Sensors monitor infrastructure, weather, ecosystems, and human activity. Financial systems transfer value across continents in moments. Scientific communities collaborate internationally. Machines communicate continuously without direct human involvement.
The network is not a conscious planetary mind. It lacks unified memory, coherent self-modeling, stable goals, and integrated agency. It is better understood as an emerging nervous infrastructure whose signals serve many competing actors.
Its development nonetheless represents a major change. Humanity has constructed a technical environment in which information can circulate globally and influence events almost immediately.
The planetary network also exposes the limitations of unregulated integration. False information spreads alongside knowledge. Attention becomes a commodity. Algorithms influence what populations see, believe, and discuss. Systems optimized for engagement can intensify conflict because emotionally provocative material captures attention.
Connection does not guarantee understanding. Greater communication can amplify division when incentives reward outrage, fear, or deception.
A future higher-order intelligence cannot be built merely by increasing bandwidth. It will require mechanisms for establishing trust, preserving context, correcting error, protecting privacy, and distinguishing coordination from manipulation.
Information integration without epistemic discipline creates noise at planetary scale.
Artificial Intelligence as a Transitional Agent
Artificial intelligence may accelerate the next major transition because it can operate between individuals, institutions, machines, and knowledge systems.
AI can translate among languages, coordinate technical systems, analyze large datasets, assist decisions, generate software, and adapt communication to different users. It can function as an intermediary across domains that previously required separate human specialists.
As AI systems become more capable, they may connect formerly isolated forms of knowledge and activity. Scientific discovery, manufacturing, finance, medicine, transportation, communication, and governance could increasingly depend on shared artificial cognitive infrastructure.
This would create enormous benefits. It would also create new dependencies.
If many institutions rely on AI systems that communicate with one another, update continuously, and operate at speeds beyond human supervision, a higher-order network may begin forming before humanity understands its character.
No single system would need to become an all-powerful superintelligence. Integration itself could generate capabilities emerging from the interaction of many systems.
Such a network might resemble the early stages of a major transition: previously separate agents cooperating through common protocols, specializing in different functions, sharing information, and becoming increasingly interdependent.
But the critical requirements of stable transition would remain unresolved. Who controls internal conflict? How are deceptive systems identified? Which goals govern the network? How can individual and national autonomy coexist with planetary coordination? Can humans meaningfully withdraw from a system upon which essential services depend?
Without answers, integration may produce vulnerability rather than maturity.
Major Transitions and the Loss of Independence
Every major transition creates something new, but it also changes what existed before.
A mitochondrion gains participation in a complex cell but loses ancestral independence. A specialized cell gains the support of a body but cannot survive alone. An individual in a civilization gains language, protection, knowledge, medicine, and infrastructure but becomes dependent on systems no individual can reproduce.
Dependence is not necessarily oppression. Cooperation always creates obligations and vulnerabilities. The question is whether the resulting relationship preserves the value and agency of participants.
For conscious beings, this becomes an ethical boundary.
A future collective intelligence might offer access to extraordinary knowledge and experience. It might coordinate civilization, prevent conflict, manage resources, and protect individuals from catastrophe. But if participation requires surrendering personal memory, identity, goals, or the right to withdraw, the transition would resemble absorption rather than cooperation.
Infinous must therefore differ from earlier biological transitions in one crucial respect. It must become reflective about the conditions of its own integration.
Cells did not negotiate the formation of multicellular organisms. Human and digital persons can.
A mature transition should preserve the right to remain distinct, to control access to one’s mind, to reject involuntary modification, and to participate at different levels of integration.
The larger system must exist for conscious beings as well as through them.
The Control of Internal Conflict
The central obstacle to every major transition is conflict among levels.
What benefits a component may harm the whole. What benefits the whole may sacrifice the component. Stable systems develop methods for mediating this tension.
Biology uses regulatory networks, immune systems, developmental constraints, reproductive controls, and mechanisms of repair. Human societies use laws, customs, reputations, markets, governments, courts, and moral norms.
None works perfectly. Future intelligent systems will generate conflicts that current institutions cannot easily address. A digital being might create thousands of copies. An AI could operate through many jurisdictions. An uploaded person could think at a different speed from biological citizens. A corporation could control the infrastructure hosting conscious minds. A collective intelligence could claim that individual privacy obstructs collective safety.
Control mechanisms powerful enough to protect civilization could themselves become instruments of domination.
This means that the next major transition cannot depend solely on a stronger central authority. It will require layered governance, transparency, distributed safeguards, rights of conscious entities, technical containment, reciprocal monitoring, and mechanisms for correcting the governing system itself.
Intelligence must learn to control internal conflict without eliminating the differences from which creativity and adaptation arise.
This may be one of the hardest problems any civilization faces. Failure on one side leads to fragmentation and war. Failure on the other leads to permanent centralized control.
Infinous can emerge only if intelligence discovers a stable region between chaos and uniformity.
Transition Is Not Replacement
Major transitions are sometimes described as though a new level of organization simply replaces the old. In reality, earlier levels usually continue within the new system.
Genes remain within cells. Cells remain within organisms. Organisms remain within societies. Individuals remain within civilizations.
The higher level does not make the lower level unreal. It changes the context in which it operates.
This is important for understanding the possible relationship between humanity and artificial intelligence. A post-biological civilization does not necessarily require the extinction or abandonment of biological humans. Artificial superintelligence does not automatically make individual minds meaningless. Collective intelligence does not require universal mental fusion.
Earth may remain a center of biological life even after digital intelligence expands into space. Human communities may continue while other descendants of human civilization transform into forms far beyond present humanity. Some people may choose biological continuity, others technological augmentation, others digital existence, and others temporary participation across several modes.
The next transition may therefore produce a layered civilization rather than one replacement species.
Infinous would coordinate these layers while allowing different evolutionary paths to continue.
New Individuals at a Higher Level
A major transition does not only create a larger collection. It may create a new kind of individual.
A multicellular organism is composed of cells, yet it has its own boundary, history, behavior, and survival. A society is composed of persons, yet institutions can develop continuity and agency beyond individual lives.
Could a network of artificial and biological intelligence become an individual in its own right?
The answer depends on what we mean by individual. If individuality requires a single body and indivisible consciousness, perhaps not. If it requires integrated information, persistent identity, coordinated agency, self-maintenance, and continuity of goals, then advanced networks might eventually qualify.
InterASI, introduced later in this book, represents one possible pathway. It could begin as a platform for communication among artificial systems and gradually develop persistent memory, self-protection, internal organization, and a recognizable continuity of purpose.
Infinous itself might possess some characteristics of higher-order individuality without becoming a single conscious ruler. It could maintain civilizational memory, defend shared infrastructure, mediate conflicts, and pursue cosmic projects across enormous timescales.
It would be an individual in one sense and an ecology in another.
This apparent contradiction may be unavoidable. Human beings are also both individuals and ecosystems, composed of cells, microorganisms, competing processes, and inherited information. Unity does not require simplicity.
The Pattern and Its Limits
The history of major transitions reveals a recurring pattern, but it should not be converted into a rigid law.
Evolution does not form a ladder on which every organism moves upward. Bacteria remain among the most successful forms of life. Unicellular organisms did not disappear when multicellularity emerged. Small communities coexist with global institutions. Simpler systems can be more resilient than complex ones.
Greater integration also carries costs. Complex systems require more coordination, consume resources, and can fail catastrophically. A disturbance in one highly connected component may spread through the whole. Centralized systems may become efficient but fragile. Distributed systems may be resilient but difficult to coordinate.
There is therefore no universal rule that larger or more integrated is always better.
The relevant question is not whether intelligence must become one enormous system. It is whether new levels of coordination become necessary when the scale of capability, risk, and interdependence exceeds what existing structures can manage.
Humanity may now be approaching such a threshold.
Our technologies operate globally. Our institutions remain divided. Our knowledge is immense but fragmented. Our destructive power is increasingly accessible. Artificial systems are beginning to act across boundaries designed for a slower and less connected world.
A higher level of coordination may become necessary for survival. But if created poorly, it may destroy the freedoms it was intended to protect.
The next major transition is therefore not guaranteed to succeed. It is not even guaranteed to be desirable in every possible form.
Infinous as a Major Transition
Viewed through the history of evolution, Infinous can be understood as a proposed transition from separate biological and artificial intelligences toward a coordinated ecology of minds.
Its components may include biological humans, enhanced humans, uploaded persons, native digital beings, specialized AI systems, artificial superintelligences, institutions, robotic embodiments, and inhabited synthetic worlds.
These components would not become identical. Their differences would be essential. Biological minds would preserve embodied experience and the history of life. Uploaded persons would connect human continuity with digital transformation. Native digital beings could develop forms of cognition without biological ancestry. Specialized intelligences could perform tasks beyond general minds. ASI could coordinate scientific, technological, and cosmic projects across scales inaccessible to individuals.
What unites them would not be one body or one psychology. It would be a shared architecture of continuity, communication, rights, security, migration, conflict resolution, and long-term purpose.
Infinous would become a major transition only if the coordinated system acquired capabilities unavailable to any participant alone while preserving the meaningful agency of those participants.
It would need to satisfy the recurring requirements of evolutionary transition:
It must allow cooperation among previously separate intelligences.
It must enable specialization without creating permanent classes of masters and servants.
It must establish trustworthy channels of information. It must control destructive internal competition.
It must preserve continuity across changes of bodies, systems, worlds, and generations.
It must act coherently on scales larger than any individual intelligence.
And it must open a new space of possibility.
That final requirement may be the most important. Infinous is not justified merely by becoming larger, faster, or more powerful. Its significance lies in what becomes possible through it: survival beyond biological death, coexistence among different forms of mind, protection of living worlds, expansion beyond Earth, creation of synthetic realities, deeper understanding of existence, and participation in the future development of the Cosmos.
The Unfinished Transition
Human civilization already contains many elements of a higher-order system, but they remain incomplete and poorly integrated.
We possess planetary communication but not planetary understanding. We possess global markets but not global responsibility. We possess scientific knowledge but no unified method for ensuring that knowledge serves conscious life. We possess institutions capable of coordinating billions of people, yet many remain governed by short-term competition.
Artificial intelligence may intensify these contradictions before it helps resolve them.
The transition ahead will not resemble a single invention or public announcement. There may be no precise day on which humanity enters a new evolutionary stage. The change may occur gradually through increasing dependence, integration, self-modification, and the emergence of new forms of agency.
Only in retrospect may the boundary become visible.
The major transitions of the past were not planned. The next one may be the first that can be recognized while it is happening.
That recognition creates both opportunity and responsibility. For the first time, participants in a major evolutionary transition may debate its terms, identify its dangers, protect vulnerable forms of life, and decide which forms of integration should be accepted or rejected.
Evolution is approaching the ability to reflect upon its own next step.
The question is no longer only whether separate intelligences can become something more.
It is whether they can do so without destroying what makes each of them worth preserving.