Marion+J.+Lamb

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= = = = = = = = =__**Marion J. Lamb**__=

Marion J. Lamb was a senior lecturer at Birbeck University of London. There, she studied the affects of altering a creatures environment, by using methods of heat, pollution, and radiation on the fruit fly can change there metabolic and genetic activity. She began to study evolutionary developmental biology and recent findings of molecular and behavioral biology. Lamb worked with Eva Jablonka to research the inheritance of epigenetic variations. In 2005 they co-authored a book called //Evolution in Four Dimensions.// This was considered to be the ongoing revolution of evolutionary biology. Recent findings of behavioral and molecular biology show that an organisms genetics alone do not determine its role in the evolutionary chain, but the organisms up bringing has just as much of an important role in evolution.

Variation can occur at four levels:
1- established physical level of genetics 2- variations in DNA translation during developmental processes are subsequently transmitted during reproduction, which can then feed back into sequence modification of DNA itself 3- comprises the transmission of behavioral traditions documented cases of food preferences being passed on, by social learning, in several animal species, which remain stable from generation to generation 4- 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

These epigenetic changes; the chemical modifications and markers that change the way regulatory proteins and enzymes have access to DNA, are currently being studied. It is trying to explain non-Mendelian patterns of inheritance. The best understood mechanism is nucleotide methylation that will silence a gene. Methylation can be inherited during cell division, both sexually (meiotic), and asexually (mitotic) during development and wound healing. Methylation is sometimes linked to RNA interference; the new and emerging science of RNA regulation of gene expression.

They argue that there are constant interactions between the levels epigenetic, and behavioral, even symbolic inheritance mechanisms produce selection pressures on DNA-based inheritance; in some cases can even help direct DNA changes, so "evolving evolution". To add richness to their information, they have utilize their thought experiments and dialogged for, "the opposite conjecture"

Since the publication of Lamb and Jablonka's book they have been critiqued quite a bit; having to cite evidence of the evolutionary chain.

Types of Hereditary ﻿Information that they have identified:
1- genetic 2- epigenetic 3- behavioral 4- cultural

They claim that this approach broadens definitions of terms, such as: - units of heredity - units of evolution - units of selection

They conclude that the evolutionary theory is not undergoing a paradigm shift, but argue that the incorporation of new data and ideas about hereditary variation, and the development in generating it, is bringing it to a different version of Darwinism; the gene-centered one has dominated evolutionary thinking in the end of the twentieth century.



Bibliography:
- Marion J. Lamb. (n.d.).//wikipedia.com//. Retrieved March 1, 2011, from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marion_J._L