The developmental construction of heredity

Abstract

Through his empirical and theoretical work, Gottlieb advanced a sophisticated and integrated view of development, which he saw as a probabilistic process of construction involving bidirectional interactions between structures and functions, and the phenotypic accommodation of the organism to changing environmental conditions. Gottlieb developed these ideas within a broad framework that went beyond the lifecycle of the individual. From his perspective as a developmental psychologist, he contributed to a way of thinking about evolutionary processes that stresses the importance and primacy of the modifications that occur during development. Through their long-term effects on physiology and behavior, environmentally induced, developmental modifications may contribute to the reconstruction of an animal's developmental and ecological niches, and therefore affect the conditions in which it and its offspring are selected. Gottlieb stressed in particular the effects of prenatal and early postnatal conditions on the development of behavior, and their long-term effects on the individual and its descendants. In this essay, I consider how the development-oriented focus that was central to Gottlieb's perspective affects evolutionary theorizing, and, more specifically, I discuss the special status of behaviorally driven evolution. ß 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Dev Psychobiol 49: 808-817, 2007.

Resilience and mental health

“…Epigenetic mechanisms provide a potential pathway through which environmental or group-level resilience factors can modify individual responsiveness to stress. Through this pathway, behavioural responses to environmental stresses may generate changes in gene expression due to cellular epigenetic changes influencing, for example, the likelihood of point mutation, transposition, recombination, and other genomic reorganizational processes (Jablonka, 2007). Thus, epigenetic modifications of gene expression viewed as responses to environments to which the developing, matured and/or aging brain are exposed (Akbarian & Huangm, 2009;Sweatt, 2009) could help explain at least some ethnic, age and gender differences in protection against mental disorders.…”

The development of animal personality: relevance, concepts and perspectives

“…Unfortunately, it is virtually impossible to design a developmental reaction norm experiment such that differences in the phenotypes of genotypes raised in the same environment can be directly attributed to genetic differences among those genotypes. The basic problem is that phenotypic traits are the product of continuous interactions between genes and experiential factors (including maternal effects) that begin at conception (Jablonka, 2007), but empiricists must wait until their subjects have grown to a more advanced stage of development before providing the different ‘environments’ or ‘experiences’ that are the foci of the reaction norm study.…”

Evolutionary Systems Theory: A Unifying Meta-Theory of Psychological Science

“…Jablonka and Lamb (2007) point out that while epigenetic inheritance systems represent additional mechanisms of phylogenetic change, this does not undermine the role of natural selection acting on random mutations. Further, Jablonka (2007) recognizes a model of the mind consistent with the HMM, arguing that some patterns of behavior are likely to be generated by “domain-general” (i.e., more inclusive) mechanisms, where development is contingent upon multiple inherited and environmental inputs and their interactions, whereas others are likely to be produced by specific genetic inputs selected over the course of evolutionary time to reliably produce highly modular (i.e., more exclusive) psychological capacities. Such points of agreement imply a compatibility between EP and EDB that warrants exploration.…”