User:J. C. Martinez-Garcia/Notebook/HMS Activities/2008/12/19
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The Jablonka and Ginsburg paperEva jablonka send me the following paper:
The paper is very interesting and its main topic concerns a proposal of a plausible biological mechanism underlying cell memory as a support of learning in non neural organisms. The proposed mechanism supposes that cell memory can be (in a non exclusive way) instantiated by chromatin marking. Based on a general concept of learning (1. One or more inputs atart a reaction that leads to a behavioral response; 2. The input-response relations are memorized, i.e. some physical traces of the reaction persist; 3. the memorized relations can be recalled upon later exposure to one or more of the inputs, the response appears then more readily or with less exposure to these inputs), the paper propose then five toy models based on chromatin marking:
In order to illustrate how these toy models can support learning, the authors provided fours simple examples:
In order to contribute to the discussion concerning cell learning, teh authors proposed two new concepts:
As far the evolutionary implications of their proposal, the authors argue that memory and learning improves fitness of organisms living in recurrently changing environments. That is! I will continue with all these things tomorrow morning. |