With elaborate division of labour, multiple hierarchies, and intricate communication networks, human societies are immensely complex. Some scholars proposed that human society may be, or may become, a new hierarchical level that may dominate the individual humans within it, similar to the relations between an organism and its cells, or an ant colony and its members. The possibility of this evolutionary transition in individuality raises interesting and controversial questions that are explored here from diverse perspectives: the general theory of evolutionary transitions, cultural evolution, human history, and specific routes of a possible human evolutionary transition. Altogether, this issue provides a broad and rich application of the notion of evolutionary transitions to human past, present and perhaps also future evolution.

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