Hi RAZD,
You're right, it's a really bad link... Brad (and others) gave good information about the Baldwin effect
here, but it's a bit of a read. A lot of the basic information is a paper "
Genetic Assimilation of an Acquired Character" by Waddington (thanks to Brad).
In other words {learned\invented} behavior that is communicated within a population can increase the survival ability of that population with no change at the biological level?
I think the idea is that the trait is "assimilated" over time into the genome through selection pressure. The trait (behavioral or morphological) originally is not expressed in the "normal" developmental environment, but over time, through this "assimilation", it comes to be.
Like the Japanese Macaques
I would say it would be like... like if some Japanese Macaques learned to make snowballs, taught others... and that at some point, if you rasied a Macaque in a Macaque community that did NOT know how to make snowballs, it would "innately know" how to do it. The "original" environment is a community with no knowledge of snowballs, so you'd have to have genetic assimilation which would give rise to the behavior without learning, but rather springing forth innately.
Did my best to work with your example, but my analysis may be flawed. The main point is that what is "acquired" through the environment is "assimilated" to the genome, such that it becomes more "robust" (Waddington's "canalization") and begins to appear AS PART OF DEVELOPMENT in more diverse environments, including the original environment where it was "acquired" in the first place.
The classic example, from the Waddington paper, is that of cross-veined-ness in fruitflies. I don't think I can summarize it well (a flaw in my knowledge) at the moment, so I hope you can find time to take a look at the paper. I'll try and take a look at it sometime today as well.
And sorry for the poor link for the Baldwin effect. Hope what I've written helps clarify it.
Thanks!
Ben
AbE: Fixed link and added subtitle.
This message has been edited by Ben, Sunday, 2005/09/18 12:13 PM