The Baldwin Effect and Genetic Assimilation

Abstract

A large body of literature exists on the so-called “Baldwin effect”, a controversial process by which an acquired trait supposedly evolves into an innate trait. C. H. Waddington's concept of “genetic assimilation” is significantly different from other ideas about how this might occur. From Waddington's perspective, evolutionary transitions between “innate” and “acquired” are to be expected because those categories have little meaning in terms of developmental genetics. Waddington's approach necessitates a different conception of the gene from that found in other literature on the Baldwin effect.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 10 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.