Maynard Smith and Szathmáry’s work on major transitions has been a landmark in macroevolutionary thinking—in thinking about large scale patterns in the history of life. But the informational dimension of their work has not been taken up. A minor exception is Sterelny (2009). This paper argued that multicelled animal life depended not just on the transmission of more information with high fidelity, but on the control of that information in development, suggesting that the evolution of the egg—a controlled, structured, information-rich developmental environment—was critical to complex animal life. But most focus has been on the other strand of their work on major transitions: on the solution of cooperation problems that then allow previously independent agents to combine into new, more complex agents. Thus in Calcott and Sterelny (2011), none of the papers focused primarily on the expansion or control of intergenerational information flow. That may change. The evolutionarily crucial features of inheritance mechanisms are often now discussed in informational terms, and the combinatorial structure seen in both language and DNA provides a powerful basis for analogical reasoning.