Eva Jablonka

Eva Jablonka is a geneticist known for her work 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. Jablonka has called for an extended evolutionary synthesis.

She has written two books with Marion Lamb Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: the Lamarckian Dimension (1995) and Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life (2005).

In her paper Soft inheritance: challenging the modern synthesis (2008) she came to the conclusion that epigenetic Lamarckian and saltational processes have a role in evolution and neo-Darwinism does not offer a satisfactory theoretical framework for evolutionary biology as it does not acknowledge the evidence for these evolutionary processes. Jablonka accepts natural selection and is not an anti-Darwinist; rather, she believes both Darwinian and Lamarckian evolutionary mechanisms have a place in evolution to be incorporated into an extended evolutionary synthesis.

Publications

 * Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb. (1995). Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: the Lamarckian Dimension.
 * Eva Jablonka and Marion J. Lamb. (2005). Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life.