Is There Another New Factor in Evolution?

For years it has been recognised that interactions between learning and evolution such as the Baldwin e ect Baldwin can be subtle and often counter intuitive Recently a new e ect has been discussed it is suggested that evolutionary progress towards one speci c goal may be assisted by lifetime learning on a di erent task which may or may not be uncorrelated Parisi Nol Cecconi Here the phenomenon is reproduced in a simple scenario where the tasks are indeed uncorrelated Another New Factor does indeed exist The e ect is then explained as being due to recovery from weight perturbations caused by mutation in a neural network It is a special case of a recently discovered relearning e ect Harvey Stone the spontaneous recovery of perturbed associations by learning uncorrelated tasks Accepted for publication in Evolutionary Computation Special Issue on Evolution Learning and Instinct Years of the Baldwin E ect