The natural world can be viewed as the product of many ‘major evolutionary transitions’, which have resulted in the formation of new types of individual – genomes, cells, organisms and superorganisms. This is a powerful and popular framework, most famously presented by Maynard-Smith & Szathmary (1995), but that was actually predated by an interesting and innovative text ‘The Individual in the Animal Kingdom’ by Julian Huxley in 1912. Myself and Rick Gawne plan to write a new introduction to this book, relating Huxley’s pre-Modern Synthesis view to the newer more theoretical research on major evolutionary transitions, in order to highlight both the old and the new and provide insights for current research.