Episode Details

Eörs Szathmáry co-developed, with the late John Maynard Smith, the theory of major transitions in evolution - the framework for understanding how life has repeatedly reorganized itself into higher levels of complexity across nearly 4 billion years. He's also a co-author, alongside Viktor Müller and Luc Steels, of a recent PNAS paper arguing that AI may be on the verge of undergoing a major transition of its own.

In this conversation, Eörs lays out what actually constitutes a major transition, what life looks like at its most stripped-down, operational level, and why he believes the real danger of advanced AI isn't superintelligence or consciousness - it's evolvability. We get into the chemistry of life's origins, a precautionary framework borrowed from infectious disease research, and what the biggest transitions in the history of life can tell us about the one that may be coming next.

This conversation explores what makes life, life, and why evolvability - not consciousness - may be the real threat posed by advanced AI, as we enter the age of AGI.

The interview is the seventh installment of The Trajectory's newest series, Stewarding the Flame, where we explore what intelligence is and ask what "flame" life possesses that non-life does not.

This episode referred to the following other essays and resources:
-- Stewarding the Flame - How to Build an Ideal Future for Intelligence: https://danfaggella.com/stewarding
-- Maynard Smith & Szathmáry, "On the likelihood of habitable worlds," Nature (1996): https://doi.org/10.1038/384107a0
-- David Sloan Wilson – Darwinian Forces Shape the Earth Superorganism (Worthy Successor, Episode 18): https://danfaggella.com/wilson1
-- Lee Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection
-- Tibor Gánti's chemoton model: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chemoton
-- Stuart Kauffman – Why Open-Ended Evolution Has Never Happened in a Machine (Stewarding the Flame, Episode 5): https://danfaggella.com/kauffman1
-- Manfred Eigen, "Selforganization of matter and the evolution of biological macromolecules" (1971): https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/1874/075007e0ed9d202b26fc85a24a44b4943f01.pdf
-- Müller, Steels & Szathmáry, "Evolvable AI: Threats of a new major transition in evolution," PNAS (2026): https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2527700123
-- Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Selfish_Gene
-- Samuel Butler, "Darwin among the Machines" (1863): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_among_the_Machines
-- Arthur C. Clarke's 1964 interview predicting AGI: https://www.techradar.com/pro/we-should-regard-it-as-a-privilege-to-be-stepping-stones-to-higher-things-how-arthur-c-clarke-predicted-the-rise-of-agi-and-the-looming-demise-of-humanity-back-in-1964
-- John Smart's transcension hypothesis: https://accelerating.org/articles/transcensionhypothesis.html
-- Stenseth & Maynard Smith, "Coevolution in Ecosystems: Red Queen Evolution or Stasis?", Evolution (1984):