Marion J. Lamb

Marion Julia Lamb (29 July 1939 – 12 December 2021) was an English Senior Lecturer at Birkbeck, University of London who studied the effect of environmental conditions such as heat, radiation and pollution on metabolic activity and genetic mutability in the fruit fly Drosophila. From the late 1980s, Lamb collaborated with Eva Jablonka, researching and writing on the inheritance of epigenetic variations, and in 2005 they co-authored the book Evolution in Four Dimensions, considered by some to be part of a potential paradigm shift within evolutionary biology.

Lamb died on 12 December 2021, at the age of 82.

Work on evolutionary themes

Building on the approach of evolutionary developmental biology, and recent findings of molecular and behavioural 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.

In 2008, Jablonka and Lamb published the paper Soft inheritance: Challenging the Modern Synthesis which claimed there is evidence for Lamarckian epigenetic control systems causing evolutionary changes and the mechanisms underlying epigenetic inheritance can also lead to saltational changes that reorganise the epigenome. Thomas Dickens and Qazi Rahman have written epigenetic mechanisms such as DNA methylation and histone modification are genetically inherited under the control of natural selection and do not challenge the modern evolutionary synthesis. Dickens and Rahman have taken issue with the claims of Jablonka and Lamb on Lamarckian epigenetic processes.

Publications

Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M.J. (1995). Epigenetic Inheritance and Evolution: the Lamarckian Dimension, Oxford University Press. , , Jablonka, E., & Lamb, M.J. (2005) Evolution in Four Dimensions: Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavioral, and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life. MIT Press.

(First published 1990).