ENCYCLICAL HUMANI GENERIS OF THE HOLY FATHER PIUS XII (12 August 1950) 36... the Teaching Authority of the Church does not forbid that... research and discussions... take place with regard to the doctrine of evolution, in as far as it inquires into the origin of the human body as coming from pre-existent and living matter - for the Catholic faith obliges us to hold that souls are immediately created by God. The Major Evolutionary Transitions Eörs Szathmáry & John Maynard Smith Nature volume 374, pages 227–232 (1995) Abstract There is no theoretical reason to expect evolutionary lineages to increase in complexity with time, and no empirical evidence that they do so. Nevertheless, eukaryotic cells are more complex than prokaryotic ones, animals and plants are more complex than protists, and so on. This increase in complexity may have been achieved as a result of a series of major evolutionary transitions. These involved changes in the way information is stored and transmitted. Findin...