Introduction: the checkered career of hierarchical thinking in evolutionary biology / General principles of biological hierarchical systems / Ilya Temkin and Emanuele Serrelli -- Pattern versus process and hierarchies: revisiting eternal metaphors in macroevolutionary theory / Lineages and systems: a conceptual discontinuity in biological hierarchies / Biological organization from a hierarchical perspective: articulation of concepts and interlevel relation / Hierarchy: the source of teleology in evolution / Approaches to the teleological and normative aspects of ecological functions / Information and energy in biological hierarchical systems / Why genomics needs multilevel evolutionary theory / Revisiting the phenotypic hierarchy in hierarchy theory / Silvia Caianiello -- Multilevel selection in a broader hierarchical perspective / Telmo Pievani and Andrea Parravicini -- Systems emergence: the origin of individuals in biological and biocultural evolution / Ecology and evolution: neither separate nor merged? / Unification of macroevolutionary theory: biologic hierarchies, consonance and the possibility of connecting the dots / Coming to terms with tempo and mode: speciation, anagenesis, and assessing relative frequencies in macroevolution / Niche conservatism, tracking, and ecological stasis: a hierarchical perspective / The stability of ecological communities as an agent of evolutionary selection: evidence from the Permian-Triassic mass extinction / Hierarchy theory in the Anthropocene: biocultural homogenization, urban ecosystems, and other emerging dynamics / Conclusion: hierarchy theory and the extended synthesis debate