Starting with Darwin, biologists have asked how populations evolve from a
low fitness state that is evolutionarily stable to a high fitness state that is not.
Specifically of interest is the emergence of cooperation and multicellularity
where the fitness of individuals often appears in conflict with that of the
population. Theories of social evolution and evolutionary game theory
have produced a number of fruitful results employing two-state two-body
frameworks. In this study, we depart from this tradition and instead consider a multi-player, multi-state evolutionary game, in which the fitness of
an agent is determined by its relationship to an arbitrary number of other
agents. We show that populations organize themselves in one of four distinct
phases of interdependence depending on one parameter, selection strength.
Some of these phases involve the formation of specialized large-scale
structures. We then describe how the evolution of independence can be
manipulated through various external perturbations.