Eva Jablonka
| Eva Jablonka | |
|---|---|
| Born | 1952 Poland |
| Institutions | Tel Aviv University |
| Doctoral students | Aviv Regev |
| Known for | Neo-Lamarckist views on epigenetics |
| Notable awards | Landau prize |
Eva Jablonka (Hebrew: חווה יבלונקה) (born 1952) is an Israeli theorist and geneticist, known especially for her interest in epigenetic inheritance. Born in 1952 in Poland, she emigrated to Israel in 1957. She is a professor at the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. In 1981 she was awarded the Landau Prize of Israel for outstanding Master of Science (M.Sc) work and in 1988, the Marcus prize for outstanding Ph.D work. She is a proponent of academic freedom, recognising that on such matters, "academic and political issues cannot really be kept apart", although she is not a proponent of simplistic solutions, and shows a preference to describe her own position.
Jablonka publishes about evolutionary themes, especially epigenetics. Her emphasis on non-genetic forms of evolution has received interest from those attempting to expand the scope of evolutionist thinking into other spheres. An example of her work in this area is the book Animal Traditions (2000), co-authored with Eytan Avital, in which they extend models of human cultural transmission to the non-human animal world, to show that cultural evolution has played an important role in the evolution of other animals. Jablonka has been described as being in the vanguard of an ongoing revolution within evolutionary biology, and was a keynote speaker at the Artificial Life XI conference in 2008.
In 2005, Jablonka co-authored with Marion Lamb the book Evolution in Four Dimensions. Building on the approach of evolutionary developmental biology, and recent findings of molecular and behavioral biology, they argue the case for the transmission of not just genes per se, but heritable variations transmitted from generation to generation by whatever means. They suggest that such variation can occur at four levels. Firstly, at the established physical level of genetics. Secondly, at the epigenetic level involving variation in the “meaning” of given DNA strands, in which variations in DNA translation during developmental processes are subsequently transmitted during reproduction, which can then feed back into sequence modification of DNA itself. The third dimension is one of particular interest to Jablonka, comprising the transmission of behavioural traditions. There are for example documented cases of food preferences being passed on, by social learning, in several animal species, which remain stable from generation to generation while conditions permit. The fourth dimension is symbolic inheritance, which is unique to humans, and in which traditions are passed on “through our capacity for language, and culture, our representations of how to behave, communicated by speech and writing.”
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