title: Phenotypic plasticity, the Baldwin effect, and the speeding up of evolution: the computational roots of an illusion.
abstract: An increasing number of dissident voices claim that the standard neo-Darwinian view of genes as 'leaders' and phenotypes as 'followers' during the process of adaptive evolution should be turned on its head. This idea is older than the rediscovery of Mendel's laws of inheritance, with the turn-of-the-twentieth-century notion eventually labeled as the 'Baldwin effect' as one of the many ways in which the standard neo-Darwinian view can be turned around. A condition for this effect is that environmentally induced variation such as phenotypic plasticity or learning is crucial for the initial establishment of a trait. This gives the additional time for natural selection to act on genetic variation and the adaptive trait can be eventually encoded in the genotype. An influential paper published in the late 1980s claimed the Baldwin effect to happen in computer simulations, and avowed that it was crucial to solve a difficult adaptive task. This generated much excitement among scholars in various disciplines that regard neo-Darwinian accounts to explain the evolutionary emergence of high-order phenotypic traits such as consciousness or language almost hopeless. Here, we use analytical and computational approaches to show that a standard population genetics treatment can easily crack what the scientific community has granted as an unsolvable adaptive problem without learning. Evolutionary psychologists and linguists have invoked the (claimed) Baldwin effect to make wild assertions that should not be taken seriously. What the Baldwin effect needs are plausible case-histories.
authors.affiliation: Departament de Genètica i de Microbiologia, Grup de Genòmica, Bioinformàtica i Biologia Evolutiva (GGBE), Universitat Autonòma de Barcelona, 08193 Bellaterra (Barcelona), Spain. Electronic address: mauro.santos@uab.es.
authors.forename: Mauro
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Santos
authors.affiliation: Parmenides Center for the Conceptual Foundations of Science, Kirchplatz 1 Pullach, D-82049 Munich, Germany; Biological Insititute and Research MTA-ELTE Theoretical Biology and Evolutionary Ecology Research Group, Eötvös University, Budapest, Hungary; Faculty of Biology, Ludwig Maximilians University Munich, Munich, Germany. Electronic address: szathmary.eors@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Eörs
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Szathmáry
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Física de São Carlos, Universidade de São Paulo, Caixa Postal 369, 13560-970 São Carlos, SP, Brazil. Electronic address: fontanar@ifsc.usp.br.
authors.forename: José F
authors.initials: JF
authors.lastname: Fontanari
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D005075:Biological Evolution; D059006:Chromosomes, Insect / Q000235:genetics; D003198:Computer Simulation; D004331:Drosophila melanogaster / Q000235:genetics; D005838:Genotype; D007858:Learning; D008954:Models, Biological; D010641:Phenotype; D011156:Population Density; D011336:Probability; D011995:Recombination, Genetic / Q000235:genetics; D012100:Reproduction, Asexual; D013997:Time Factors
keywords: Evolutionary search; Genetic algorithm; Learning; Speed of evolution; The Baldwin effect