Landscapes, Learning Costs and Genetic Assimilation

The evolution of a population can be guided by phenotypic traits acquired by members of that population during their lifetime. This phenomenon, known as the Baldwin EEect, can speed the evolutionary process as traits that are initially acquired become genetically speciied in later generations. This paper presents conditions under which this genetic assimilation can take place. As well as the beneets that lifetime adaptation can give a population, there may be a cost to be paid for that adaptive ability. It is the evolutionary trade-oo between these costs and beneets that provides the selection pressure for acquired traits to become genetically speciied. It is also noted that genotypic space, in which evolution operates, and phenotypic space, on which adaptive processes (such as learning) operate, are, in general, of a diierent nature. To guarantee an acquired characteristic can become genetically speciied, then these spaces must have the property of neighbourhood correlation which means that a small distance between two individuals in phenotypic space implies that there is a small distance between the same two individuals in genotypic space.