Exploring Baldwin in Montpellier: The 2014 “James Baldwin: Transatlantic Commuter” Conference

Exploring the Baldwin Effect in Evolving Adaptable Control Systems

A neural network model is presented which is an abstraction of many real world adaptable control systems that seems to be sufficiently complex to provide interesting results, yet simple enough that computer simulations of its evolution can be carried out in weeks rather than years. Some preliminary explorations of the interaction between learning and evolution in this system are described, toge...

Richard Baldwin

Development and the Baldwin Effect

Baldwin's classic hypothesis states that behavioral plasticity can speed evolution by (a) smoothing the fitness landscape and (b) indirect genetic assimilation of acquired characteristics. This latter phase demands a strong correlation between genotype and phenotype space. But the natural world shows signs of this correlation at only a very coarse level, since the intervening developmental proc...

The hiring of James Mark Baldwin and James Gibson Hume at the University of Toronto in 1889.

In 1889, George Paxton Young, the University of Toronto's philosophy professor, passed away suddenly while in the midst of a public debate over the merits of hiring Canadians in preference to American and British applicants for faculty positions. As a result, the process of replacing Young turned into a continuation of that argument, becoming quite vociferous and involving the popular press and...

James mark Baldwin with alfred north whitehead on organic selectivity: the “novel” factor in evolution

the aim of this paper is to show how James mark Baldwin’s theory of organic selection (also known as the “Baldwin effect”) can be fruitfully integrated with alfred north whitehead’s speculative philosophy, as part of the endeavor to develop a comprehensive process-relational evolutionary cosmology. in so doing, it provides an overview of the theory of organic selection and points to several con...