The Baldwin effect is the notion that life time adaptation can speed up evolution by 1) identifying good traits and 2) by genetic assimilation inscribing the traits in the population genetically. This thesis investigates the Baldwin effect by giving an introduction to its history, its current status in evolutionary biology and by reviewing some important experiments on the Baldwin effect in art...

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 ...

Escaping local optima and crossing fitness valleys to reach higher-fitness regions of a fitness landscape is a ubiquitous concept in much writing on evolutionary difficulty. The Baldwin effect, an interaction between non-heritable lifetime plasticity (e.g. learning) and evolution, has been shown to be able to guide evolutionary change and ‘smooth out’ abrupt fitness changes in fitness landscape...

s: Giardina T.D., Baldwin J, Sittig DF, Singh H, Patient Perceptions of Test Result Notification Via the Patient Portal. Access, Analysis, Action. Public Health Informatics Conference, Atlanta, GA, August 19-25, 2016. Nystrom D.T., Giardina T.D., Baldwin J, Sittig D.F., Singh H., Exploring the Patient Perspective on Access, Interpretation, and Use of Test Results from Patient Portals. AMIA 2016...