Social learning and the Baldwin effect

Abstract

Put like that, it sounds like Lamarckism. But that is not the idea. When James Mark Baldwin and others first posited the Baldwin effect over a hundred years ago, their concern was precisely to uncover a respectable Darwinian mechanism for the Baldwin effect . The great German cytologist Augustus Weismann had already persuaded them that there is no automatic genetic inheritance of acquired characteristics: the ontogenetic acquisition of a phenotypic trait cannot in itself alter the genetic material of the lineage that has acquired it. The thought behind the Baldwin effect is in effect that an alternative Darwinian mechanism might nevertheless mimic Lamarckism, in allowing learning to influence genetic evolution, but without requiring Lamarck’s own discredited hypothesis that learning directly affects the genome.

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