James Baldwin: Interventions

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...

Beyond the Baldwin Effect: James Mark Baldwin’s ‘social heredity’, epigenetic inheritance and niche-construction

James Mark Baldwin is remembered today almost exclusively for his paper ‘A New Factor in Evolution’ (Baldwin, 1896a). The new factor, which he called ‘organic selection’ and which later became known as the Baldwin effect, was a process that could cause ‘accomodations’ the acquired adaptive responses of individual organisms to become hereditary. ‘Accomodations’ include physiological adaptations ...

Richard Baldwin

James

a chair, he was the very picture of dejection. His small head was hanging, an obstreperous tuft of the coarse, sandy hair standing defiantly upright on the crown of it; his complexion was sallow and pasty, and not in any way enhanced by a sparse scattering of tiny yellow freckles, plainly visible at close view; his generous mouth drooped, like his head, the lips pale, but firmly closed. In his ...