Evolution in Four Dimensions
Channel: VideoLecturesChannel
Date: 13/11/2012

VideoLectures.Net Single Lectures Series 
View the complete series: http://videolectures.net/single_lecture_series/
Speaker:  Eva Jablonka, Tel Aviv University 

Ideas about heredity and evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. New findings in molecular biology challenge the gene-centered version of Darwinian theory according to which adaptation occurs only through natural selection of chance DNA variations. In Evolution in Four Dimensions, Eva Jablonka and Marion Lamb argue that there is more to heredity than genes. They trace four "dimensions" in evolution—four inheritance systems that play a role in evolution: genetic, epigenetic (or non-DNA cellular transmission of traits), behavioral, and symbolic (transmission through language and other forms of symbolic communication). These systems, they argue, can all provide variations on which natural selection can act. Evolution in Four Dimensions offers a richer, more complex view of evolution than the gene-based, one-dimensional view held by many today. The new synthesis advanced by Jablonka and Lamb makes clear that induced and acquired changes also play a role in evolution.

After discussing each of the four inheritance systems in detail, Jablonka and Lamb "put Humpty Dumpty together again" by showing how all of these systems interact. They consider how each may have originated and guided evolutionary history and they discuss the social and philosophical implications of the four-dimensional view of evolution. Each chapter ends with a dialogue in which the authors engage the contrarieties of the fictional (and skeptical) "I.M.," or Ifcha Mistabra—Aramaic for "the opposite conjecture"—refining their arguments against I.M.'s vigorous counterarguments. The lucid and accessible text is accompanied by artist-physician Anna Zeligowski's lively drawings, which humorously and effectively illustrate the authors' points.

0:00  The four Dimensions of Evolution
0:12  Eva Jablonka and Maron Lamb
0:45  Picture -1
3:49  Inputs to development and heredity
4:22  There are different models of inheritance between generations
4:54  Waddington's epigenetic landscape with underlying gene networks
7:47  Different Cell Types with the Same DNA
9:00  Epigenetic Cellular Inheritance Systems
10:19  Self-sustaining loop
12:21  Picture -2
12:54  Structural inheritance
15:15  Inheritance of (PSI+) and psi in yeast cells
15:54  Inheritance of methylation patterns
18:40  Picture -3
19:21  Picture -4
20:37  Germline transmission of induced changes
22:35  Picture -5
24:39  Inherited cardiac hypertrophy induced by injection of early embryos with a specific microRNA
24:46  Cases of trans-generational epigenetic inheritance
26:29  Body-to-body routes of transmission
27:50  Maternal behaviour in the rat
29:56  Putative promoter sites of genomic GR