Learning and Evolution: On the Effects of Directional Learning

In this paper we demonstrate that learning tend to have a beneficial effect on evolution even if the characters that are acquired through learning do not have any adaptive advantage by themselves. The beneficial effect is due to the fact that learning force evolution to select individuals that are located in regions of the search space in which the learning and the evolutionary tasks are dynamically correlated. This has two implications: (1) evolving individuals display a predisposition-effect to benefit from learning, i.e. while improving their performance with respect to the learning task during lifetime they also tend to improve their performance with respect to the evolutionary task, and (2) evolving individuals display a shelter-effect, i.e. lifetime learning allows them to partially recover from mutations that are deleterious with respect to the evolutionary task. This, in turn, might allow learning individuals to tolerate higher mutation rate than non-learning individuals thus enhancing the exploratory power of the evolutionary search.