Professor emerita of Genetics Eva Jablonka

The lecture: Epigenetic Inheritance and the extended evolutionary synthesis.

As part of Darwin Day 2024, evolutionary theorist and geneticist Eva Jablonka will talk on Tuesday, February 13 at 10:00 at the Michael Sars Centre. 

"There is a debate among evolutionary biologists today about the need to significantly revise the neo-Darwinian model of evolution that was dominant for the last seventy years. After presenting the views for and against the revision, I discuss the challenges to the traditional theory that are coming from an expanded notion of heredity, focusing on epigenetic inheritance. I suggest that these challenges require a reformulation of basic assumptions of the dominant neo-Darwinian version of evolutionary theory and the construction of a new, extended and revised evolutionary thought-style" - Eva Jablonka.

Darwin Day 2024

The Department of Biological Sciences (BIO) and the Michael Sars Centre at UiB are co-organizing Darwin Day 2024. There will be two lectures. The first will include a public event in Egget at the UiB Student Centre on Monday, February 12 at 16.15. In this lecture, "The evolution of learning and the origins of consciousness," Eva Jablonka will address the question of the origins of animal mentality, which Darwin avoided, and present an evolutionary approach for studying it, developed together with Simona Ginsburg. The second lecture will be held at the Michael Sars Centre on Tuesday morning. 

Both lectures will be in English. For more information please go to: https://darwin.uib.no/

Eva Jablonka is professor emerita at the Cohn Institute for the History of Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. She is an evolutionary theorist and a geneticist. With Marion Lamb she wrote the book Evolution in Four Dimensions (2005) where they argued that epigenetics, social learning and symbolic language are three extra evolutionary dimensions on top of classical genetic inheritance. With Simona Ginsburg she wrote The Evolution of the Sensitive Soul: Learning and the Origins of Consciousness (2019) where they, after reviewing the history of philosophical, psychological, biological and neuroscientific theories of consciousness, proposed that the origin of consciousness was based on the gradual evolution of learning and cognition. This evolution also led to evolution of emotion and stress management and was a major factor in the Cambrian explosion of complex animal life. The origin of consciousness is followed up in the book Picturing the Mind: Consciousness through the Lens of Evolution (2022), also with Ginsburg and illustrated by the artist Anna Zeligowski.