1. Our understanding of man’s place in the universe
Eörs Szathmáry
Collegium Budapest
Eötvös University

2. “In between infinity and nothing”
“For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed. “
Blaise Pascal ( )

3. Units of evolution multiplication heredity
variation
hereditary traits affecting survival and/or reproduction

4. The major transitions (1995)* * * *
* These transitions are regarded to be ‘difficult’

5. Difficulty of a transition
Selection limited (special environment)
Pre-emption: first come  selective overkill
Variation-limited: improbable series of rare variations (genetic code, eukaryotic nucleocytoplasm, etc.)

6. Difficult transitions are ‘unique’
Operational definition: all organisms sharing the trait go back to a common ancestor after the transition
These unique transitions are usually irreversible (no cell without a genetic code, no bacterium derived from a eukaryote can be found today)

7. Recurrent themes in transitions
Independently reproducing units come together and form higher-level units
Division of labour/combination of function
Origin of novel inheritance systems Increase in complexity
Contingent irreversibility
Central control

8. Chemical evolution was a race between tar formation and life formation
Chemical networks
Tar
Life
What fraction of planets would end up with just tar?

9. Gánti’s chemoton model (1974)
metabolism
template copying
membrane growth
ALL THREE SUBSYSTEMS ARE AUTOCATALYTIC

10. Pathways of supersystem evolution
metabolism
M B
boundary
M T
M B T
template
B T
INFRABIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS

11. Primate phylogeny

12. Chronology and geography

13. The coevolutionary star and the human adaptive suite

14. The social brain

15. On human cooperation
Bowles, S. (2006) Group competition, reproductive levelling, and the evolution of human altruism. Science
A possible explanation—that groups with more altruists survive when groups compete—has long been judged untenable on empirical grounds for most species.

16. On human cooperation II.
Empirical estimates show that genetic differences between early human groups are likely to have been great enough so that lethal intergroup competition could account for the evolution of altruism.
Crucial to this process were distinctive human practices such as sharing food beyond the immediate family, monogamy, and other forms of reproductive levelling.

17. On human cooperation III.
These culturally transmitted practices presuppose advanced cognitive and linguistic capacities, possibly accounting for the distinctive forms of altruism found in our species.

18. Why is language so interesting?
Because everybody knows that only we talk
…although other animals may understand a number of words
Language makes long-term cumulative cultural evolution possible
A novel type of inheritance system with showing “unlimited hereditary” potential

19. Design features of language
Compositionality (meaning dependent on how parts are combined)
Recursion (phrases within phrases)
Symbolicism (versus icons and indices)
Cultural transmission (rather than genetic)
SYMBOLIC REFERENCE and SYNTAX

20. Three interwoven processes
Note the different time-scales involved
Cultural transmission: language transmits itself as well as other things, and has its own dynamics

21. Understanding language evolution is difficult

22. BUT: Recursive syntactic pattern learning in birds!
European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) accurately recognize recursive syntactic patterns
They are able to exlude agrammatical forms
Centre-embedding is not uniquely human?

23. Patterns are made up of naturally occurring vocal patterns
Learning to classify by operant conditioning
This is NOT production!

24. Note on human understanding
known
unknown
time

25. Boundary to the unknown
time

26. Infinite, limited progress
Species-specific limit
knowledge
time