James Mark Baldwin, answered from the texts and cited to the page.
Darwin's difficulty, and Lamarck's false solution, was this: how can an adaptation that an animal must learn afresh in each generation ever become part of its inborn nature, if acquired characters are not inherited?12 I offered a way that keeps faith with Darwin and needs no inheritance of the acquired. Call it organic selection. When a population meets a new demand, the individuals plastic enough to learn or accommodate to it survive where the rigid perish; the learned adaptation keeps the stock alive in the new conditions.
But now, among the survivors, natural selection can work across the generations upon the congenital variations that make the adaptation come easier and sooner — for those variations are now advantageous — until at last the once-learned response is met halfway, or wholly, by inborn endowment. The learning does not write itself into the germ; it holds the ground on which selection then builds the instinct. So intelligence and plasticity are not idle in evolution: they steer its direction, without a particle of Lamarck.345
So long as the environment remains the same, each generation will develop, after its birth as an individual, the same sort of acquired variations. These, appearing regu- 1 Cf. the positions taken above, pp. 331 ff.—J. M. B. HT, W. Conn 365 larly in subsequent generations, would probably be regarded as inherited, although in reality they are only independently acquired by each individual.Development and Evolution
The influence of new adjustments, however, in determining the limits of variation im subsequent generations without appealing to the inhert- tance of acquired characters —that is the combination which we have considered new, although I should not have had the courage to label it so if certain biologists familiar with the history of discussion had not so character- ized'it?Development and Evolution
This is the hypothesis of Germinal Selection.1 Apart from any experimental evi dence for this conception, it may be said that it makes the theory of preformism more ironclad than ever, since the germs selected bear their intrinsic potencies of development. Organic Selection. It appeared clear to others that the hypothesis of germinal selection was not necessary — so far as the problem of instinct was concerned.Darwin and the Humanities, pp. 17–19
If this difficulty could be met, the theory that intelligence has been at work in the origination of the complex instincts would be altogether the preferable one of the two; but if not, then the " lapsed intelligence " view must be thrown overboard.The Story of the Mind, pp. 34–35
The psychologists give 1 A critical account of the theories of Spencer and Bain is to be found in ch. vii of my work, Mental Development (1894; 3d ed., 1906). 'Functional Selection' was suggested in that work (Mental Development, 2nd ed., 1895); it is used by Lloyd Morgan, A nimal Behaviour, and others. See also the writer's earlier article, 'The Origin of Volition,' in Proc. Int. Cong, of Psychol., London, 1892.Darwin and the Humanities, pp. 16–17
The Baldwin effect is a genuine and still-debated concept in evolutionary biology, co-formulated independently by Lloyd Morgan and Osborn and revived in the late twentieth century in discussions of the evolution of learning, language, and cultural capacity (Dennett, Terrence Deacon). The open questions are whether it is a distinct evolutionary mechanism or a special, perhaps limited, case of ordinary natural selection acting on plasticity, and how much evolutionary work it actually does. It is not repudiated — it is a live hypothesis — and it stands as Baldwin's substantive contribution to Darwinian theory proper, keeping learning evolutionarily relevant without Lamarckism.