THE BALDWIN EFFECT

Development and the Baldwin Effect

Baldwin's classic hypothesis states that behavioral plasticity can speed evolution by (a) smoothing the fitness landscape and (b) indirect genetic assimilation of acquired characteristics. This latter phase demands a strong correlation between genotype and phenotype space. But the natural world shows signs of this correlation at only a very coarse level, since the intervening developmental proc...

Myths and Legends of the Baldwin Effect

This position paper argues that the Baldwin effectis widely misunderstood by the evolutionarycomputation community. The misunderstandingsappear to fall into two general categories. Firstly,it is commonly believed that the Baldwin effect isconcerned with the synergy that results whenthere is an evolving population of learning indi-viduals. This is only half of the sto...

Toward an Understanding of the Baldwin Effect

After a short review of the quasar problem and what we can hope to learn from their emission line spectra, I discuss the current body of knowledge concerning quasar emission lines and their relationships to the local and ionizing continua. I propose a hypothesis that the Baldwin effect is due to a characteristic relationship between the continuum spectral energy distribution, the gas metallicit...

Evolution of the LAD & the Baldwin Effect

The revival of the Baldwin Effect

The idea that a genetically fixed behavior evolved from the once differential learning ability of individuals that performed the behavior is known as the Baldwin effect. A highly influential paper [Complex Syst. 1, 495 (1987)] claimed that this effect can be observed in silico, but here we argue that what was actually shown is that the learning ability is easily selected for. Then we demonstrat...