Abstract
The Baldwin effect is a hypothetical process in which a learned response to environmental change evolves a genetic basis. Modelling has shown that the Baldwin effect offers a plausible and elegant explanation for the emergence of complex behavioural traits, but there is little direct empirical evidence for its occurrence. We highlight experimental evidence of the Baldwin effect and argue that it acts preferentially on peripheral rather than on central cognitive processes. Careful scrutiny of research on taste-aversion and fear learning, language, and imitation indicates that their efficiency depends on adaptively specialised input and output processes: analogues of scanner and printer interfaces that feed information to core inference processes and structure their behavioural expression.
Highlights
Specialization for language processing has focussed on perceptuomotor aspects of speech rather than on innate principles of universal grammar
For more than a century it has been poised to revolutionise our understanding of the evolution of complex behavioural traits, Outstanding Questions
Baldwinisation is plausible for human fear learning, imitation, and language because there is evidence that traits which have a genetic basis were learned earlier in the organism’s phylogenetic history
Summary
Specialization for language processing has focussed on perceptuomotor aspects of speech rather than on innate principles of universal grammar. We argue that there is good empirical evidence for this hypothesis regarding peripheral cognitive mechanisms (i.e., input or perceptual systems, and output or action systems, both modulated by attention and motivation), but not for the complex and interlocking central processes, involving inference and memory, that have durable effects on the relationships between perception and action [8] (Figure 1, Key Figure). Research on preparedness suggests that, across species, Baldwinisation has had a much greater impact on peripheral than on central cognitive mechanisms [11]. Suggests that Baldwinisation has targeted peripheral mechanisms – the psychological analogues of keyboards, scanners, speakers, and printers and their associated software – and not the core cognitive processes that make language and imitation possible
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