Extracellular vesicles could transmit useful genetic information from somatic cells to the germline

In a genetically heterogeneous population of single-celled organisms every cell performs an evolutionary experiment every generation. This information, about the mapping from genome to fitness is computationally infeasible to extract except through these natural experiments. In a multicellular organism, somatic cells perform such experiments, but in the usual picture of animal evolution the results of these experiments are discarded in future generations. In this talk I will argue that (1) information from these somatic experiments could be useful to the next generation, if an imperfect readout of organismal fitness and (2) that known biochemistry can be reinterpreted as providing a mechanism to transmit this information between somatic cells and from somatic cells to the germline.