{"agent_id":"baldwin","agent_name":"James Mark Baldwin","slug":"organic-selection-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Organic selection (the Baldwin effect): can learning guide evolution without the inheritance of acquired characters?","topic":"Organic selection (the Baldwin effect)","question":"Can learning guide evolution without the inheritance of acquired characters?","position":"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? 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.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"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?","n":[1,2]},{"t":"I offered a way that keeps faith with Darwin and needs no inheritance of the acquired.","n":[]},{"t":"Call it organic selection.","n":[]},{"t":"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.","n":[]}],[{"t":"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.","n":[3]},{"t":"The learning does not write itself into the germ; it holds the ground on which selection then builds the instinct.","n":[]},{"t":"So intelligence and plasticity are not idle in evolution: they steer its direction, without a particle of Lamarck.","n":[4,5]}]],"texts":"A New Factor in Evolution (1896); Development and Evolution (1902); Darwin and the Humanities (1909). Reception: the independent co-formulation by C. Lloyd Morgan and H. F. Osborn; the mid-century neglect and late-century revival of the Baldwin effect in evolutionary biology and in the study of the evolution of learning and language (Dennett, Deacon); the debate over whether it is a distinct mechanism or a special case of standard selection.","works":["A New Factor in Evolution (1896)","Development and Evolution (1902)","Darwin and the Humanities (1909)"],"reception":"the independent co-formulation by C. Lloyd Morgan and H. F. Osborn; the mid-century neglect and late-century revival of the Baldwin effect in evolutionary biology and in the study of the evolution of learning and language (Dennett, Deacon); the debate over whether it is a distinct mechanism or a special case of standard selection.","status":"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.","era":"1861-1934","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Development and Evolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"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.","label":"Development and Evolution"},{"n":2,"work":"Development and Evolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"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?","label":"Development and Evolution"},{"n":3,"work":"Darwin and the Humanities","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Variation plus modification, the joint product actually present at the time the struggle comes on, this is what selection pro ceeds upon, and not, as strict neo-Darwinism or Weismann- ism supposes, upon the congenital variations taken alone.","label":"Darwin and the Humanities"},{"n":4,"work":"Development and Evolution","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"A word in regard to that. If.we give up altogether the principle of modification by use and disuse, and the possibility of new adjustments in a creature's own lifetime, we must go back to the strictest preformism. But to say that such new adjustments influence phylogenetic evolution only in case they are in- herited, is to go over to the theory of Lamarckism. Now 1 Chap. VIII. 8. See also Chap. XIII. 3, note.","label":"Development and Evolution"},{"n":5,"work":"Darwin and the Humanities","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"'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. 1 6 DARWIN AND THE HUMANITIES attention to the actual processes as they take place in the individual. But this is not all.","label":"Darwin and the Humanities"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"imitation-and-the-circular-reaction","label":"Imitation and the circular reaction: is development driven by the child's imitative appropriation of others' acts?"},{"slug":"the-social-self","label":"The social self: is there any private ego prior to society, or are self and other born together?"},{"slug":"the-child-and-the-race","label":"The child and the race: does the mental development of the individual parallel the mental evolution of humanity?"}]}