So life itself, the argument goes, depends on the evolution of mechanisms that support a high fidelity flow of information from one generation to the next. More ambitiously still, Maynard Smith and Szathmáry argue that many of the crucial steps in the last four billion years of evolution—their “major transitions in evolution”—involve the creation of new ways of transmitting information across generations—more reliable, more fine-grained, and more powerful ways of making possible the reliable re-creation of form across events of biological reproduction. The transition to a DNA-based inheritance system (probably from a system based on RNA) is one central example. But Maynard Smith and Szathmáry suggest that the transition from great ape forms of social life to human social life is a major transition, in part because of the novel forms of large scale cooperation that typify human social life, but mostly because they see human language as a breakthrough informational technology, revolutionising the possibilities of high fidelity intergenerational cultural learning (MacArthur 1958; Maynard Smith and Szathmáry 1995, 1999).