A complex web of arguments, this effect in essence is based on the claim that the ability of individual organisms to learn can influence the process of evolution. Such an influence is achieved by organisms having the genetic pre-disposition for the ability to experiment with potential adaptations, select those that are beneficial for survival, continue to employ them to promote long-term survival, and then to pursue them over less beneficial ones, thus facilitating their long-term survival. Through the cultural transmission between generations of these favorable adaptations or traits, they are maintained in the population. Subsequently, they come under genetic control or some form of epigenetic inheritance, and are passed onto offspring without the original environmental conditions of elicitation being present. While the effect carries James Mark Baldwin‘s name, it was in fact independently discovered by the psychologist Conway Lloyd Morgan (1852-1936) and the palaeontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn (1857-1953). Baldwin (1861-1934) himself referred to it as ‘organic selection’ in order to contrast it with natural selection, and with it endeavored to find a theoretical middle ground between Darwinism and Lamarckism while retaining allegiance to the former. For Baldwin, fine motor skills played a significant role in creating the effect because of their inherent phenotypical plasticity arising from variability (or what he termed ‘overproduction’) in the ways they could be performed. With use, the variability is ‘pruned down’ through the process of organic selection, and in this respect having some similarities with Edelman’s theory of neuronal group selection. Toward the middle of the 20th century, Conrad H. Waddington (1905-1975) incorporated the notion of organic selection into his model of genetic assimilation, but without really giving Baldwin sufficient credit. More recently, the Baldwin effect forms a crucial modelling tool in the growing area of evolutionary computation (i.e., artificial life and genetic algorithms) as it attempts to simulate the rapid evolution of the cerebral cortex in general and language in particular. At present, there are those who welcome back the Baldwin effect into the evolutionary fold (the ‘Baldwin boosters’), and those who consider it to be a retrograde step (the ‘Baldwin skeptics’) in that it is perceived as creating a contrived distinction between inheritance and learning.
See Adaptation, Genetic assimilation, Epigenetics, Evolutionary developmental biology, Fine motor abilities, Lamarckism, Motor skill, Natural selection, Plasticity (experiential), Theory of natural selection, Theory of neuronal group selection (TGNS)