1. Mi öröklődik a géneken kívül?
Szathmáry Eörs
Collegium Budapest
Eötvös University

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

3. The formose ‘reaction’
formaldehyde
autocatalysis
glycolaldehyde
Butlerow, 1861

4. The reductive citric acid cycle

5. Von Kiedrowski’s replicator

6. Peptide replicator networks

7. Classification of replicators
Limited heredity
Unlimited heredity
Holistic
formose
Modular
Von Kiedrowski
genes
Limited (# of individuals)  (# of types)
Unlimited (# of individuals) << (# of types)

8. King (1980): evolution of the coenzymes
He looked at the metabolic maps then
Coenzymes looked auto- and cross-catalytic
BUT the situation is slightly more complicated
The idea nicely links to the assumed primitive ancestry of coenzymes (related to the idea of the RNA world)

9. An autocatalytic cycle in the given environment

10. Although A is autocatalytic, it is not strictly needed
Dependent on the environment!

11. Autocatalysis of the pair (A, B) is more complicated, but easy to see

12. If this is big, you may not realize the autocatalysts

13. The basic question
Could one kick-start metabolism just with external molecules and macromolecules (genes an enzymes)?
Influx  buildup of metabolism?

14. Metabolic networks

15. Membrane heredity

16. Principle of membrane heredity

17. Epigenetic inheritance
Structural inheritance (e.g. cortical inheritance in ciliates)
Autocatalytic gene activity
Chromatin marking (e.g. methylation)

18. Prions

19. Strain-specific prion propagation

20. Yeast and fungal amyloid prions

21. Genetic and epigenetics

22. Regulation of gene expression by constitutive expression of a protein
After division the state is inherited because enough protein is around

23. Stable and unstable epigenetic markings

24. Inheritance of DNA methylation patterns

25. Linaria flower inheritance

26. Linaria (gyújtoványfű)
A naturally occurring mutant of Linaria vulgaris, originally described more than 250 years ago by Linnaeus, in which the fundamental symmetry of the flower is changed from bilateral to radial.
The mutant carries a defect in Lcyc, a homologue of the cycloidea gene which controls dorsoventral asymmetry in Antirrhinum.
The Lcyc gene is extensively methylated and transcriptionally silent in the mutant.
This modification is heritable and co-segregates with the mutant phenotype.
Occasionally the mutant reverts phenotypically during somatic development, correlating with demethylation of Lcyc and restoration of gene expression.
It is surprising that the first natural morphological mutant to be characterized should trace to methylation, given the rarity of this mutational mechanism in the laboratory.
This indicates that epigenetic mutations may play a more significant role in evolution than has hitherto been suspected.

27. Somatic instability of peloric plants

28. Types of transmitted variation

29. Language is not Weismannian
germ
DNA
protein
germ
soma
germ
Neural representation
sentence

30. Chimpanzee culture
Each chimpanzee community has its own unique array of traditions that together constitute the local ‘culture’.
‘Customary’ acts are those typical in the community, ‘habitual’ ones are less common but consistent with social transmission, and ‘absent’ acts are those missing with no apparent straightforward environmental explanation.
Traditions are defined as behaviour patterns that are customary or habitual in at least one site but absent elsewhere.
Transmission is attributed to social learning on the basis of a complex of circumstantial evidence, ranging from intense observation by juveniles to distributions inconsistent with alternative explanations.

31. The cultures of wild chimpanzees

32. The different social conventions of neighbours: the grooming hand-clasp

33. Tool-set for harvesting termites

34. Selective copying

35. 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

36. 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

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