{"agent_id":"lloydmorgan","agent_name":"C. Lloyd Morgan","slug":"instinct-habit-and-the-baldwin-effect","label":"Instinct, habit, and the Baldwin effect: how do the inherited and the acquired combine in evolution?","topic":"Instinct, habit, and the Baldwin effect","question":"How do the inherited and the acquired combine in evolution?","position":"Acquired habits are not inherited — the Lamarckian hope is vain, for what an animal learns dies with it. And yet learning is not therefore idle in evolution. An animal that can learn to meet a new condition survives where the unplastic perish, and so the capacity to acquire the right habit is itself selected, and the stock is steered, over generations, toward the instinct that the habit foreshadowed. Plasticity guides evolution without violating heredity — this is organic selection.","paragraphs":[[{"t":"Acquired habits are not inherited — the Lamarckian hope is vain, for what an animal learns dies with it.","n":[1]},{"t":"And yet learning is not therefore idle in evolution.","n":[]},{"t":"An animal that can learn to meet a new condition survives where the unplastic perish, and so the capacity to acquire the right habit is itself selected, and the stock is steered, over generations, toward the instinct that the habit foreshadowed.","n":[2]},{"t":"Plasticity guides evolution without violating heredity — this is organic selection.","n":[3,4]}]],"texts":"Habit and Instinct (1896); the co-formulation, with Baldwin and Osborn, of organic selection (the Baldwin effect). Reception: the rejection of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters; the modern evolutionary-developmental interest in how plasticity guides evolution.","works":["Habit and Instinct (1896)","the co-formulation, with Baldwin and Osborn, of organic selection (the Baldwin effect)"],"reception":"the rejection of Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characters; the modern evolutionary-developmental interest in how plasticity guides evolution.","status":"This I hold as one of the soundest things I helped to see: it saves the real role of learning in evolution without the false coin of Lamarckism. That the mechanism was long neglected and is only now rediscovered under the study of plasticity I regard as a vindication deferred.","era":"1852-1936","discipline":"Psychology","refs":[{"n":1,"work":"Habit and Instinct","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"It would seem more reasonable to suppose that they are incidental characters, wrought into the congenital nexus, and thus though not directly, still indirectly, due to natural selection. Even so, however, their definiteness is somewhat difficult to explain. If one says that a duck- ling behaves just in this particular way because it is a Are Acquired Habits inherited?","label":"Habit and Instinct"},{"n":2,"work":"Habit and Instinct","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"We have to take into account acquired stability due to habit as well as congenital stability due to heredity. The three factors are, therefore, (1) congenital stability, (2) youthful plasticity, and (3) acquired stability. Now, 286 Habit and Instinct.","label":"Habit and Instinct"},{"n":3,"work":"Animal Behaviour","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"Trace the ancestry of any cell in the adult body, say a nerve-cell, and you reach the fertilized ovum. Trace back the ancestral line yet further, and you follow a long sequence of reproductive cells, or, at least, of cells which have undergone but little differentiation; but never again will you find, in the course of a genealogy of bewildering length, a nerve-cell.","label":"Animal Behaviour"},{"n":4,"work":"Animal Behaviour","page":"","canonical":"","quote":"And in the course of a number of generations the new instinct would reach the fully adaptive level, and further modification by intelligence would become unnecessary unless the environment continued to change yet more.","label":"Animal Behaviour"}],"answer":null,"siblings":[{"slug":"morgan-s-canon","label":"Morgan's Canon: is parsimony the right rule for interpreting animal minds?"},{"slug":"against-anecdote","label":"Against anecdote: must the study of animal minds rest on controlled observation, not stories?"},{"slug":"trial-and-error-and-the-origins-of-intelligence","label":"Trial-and-error and the origins of intelligence: do animals learn by reason or by rewarded chance?"},{"slug":"emergent-evolution","label":"Emergent evolution: do genuinely new properties arise at higher levels of nature, irreducible to the lower?"}]}