Baldwin effect
Noun
Meaning
Baldwin effect (plural Baldwin effects)
(evolutionary theory) The effect whereby an organism's ability to learn new behaviours affects its reproductive success and therefore changes the genetic makeup of its species through natural selection.
Examples
Dual inheritance theory posits that genes and human culture have interacted, with genes affecting the development of culture, and culture, in turn, affecting human evolution on a genetic level (see also the Baldwin effect ).
The scope of the Baldwin effect was recently called into question by two papers that closely examined the seminal work of Hinton and Nowlan.