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

Griffiths, Paul E (2001) Beyond the Baldwin Effect: James Mark Baldwin's 'social heredity', epigenetic inheritance and niche construction. [Preprint]

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    Abstract

    I argue that too much attention has been paid to the Baldwin effect. George Gaylord Simpson was probably right when he said that the effect is theoretically possible and may have actually occurred but that this has no major implications for evolutionary theory. The Baldwin effect is not even central to Baldwin�s own account of �social heredity� and biology-culture co-evolution, an account that in important respects resembles the modern ideas of epigenetic inheritance and niche-construction.

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    Item Type: Preprint
    Keywords: baldwin effect genetic assimilation cultural evolution developmental psychlogy Lamarckian inheritance
    Subjects: Specific Sciences > Biology > Developmental Biology
    Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Psychology
    Specific Sciences > Biology > Evolutionary Theory
    Specific Sciences > Psychology/Psychiatry
    Specific Sciences > Sociology
    Depositing User: Paul Edmund Griffiths
    Date Deposited: 17 Oct 2001
    Last Modified: 07 Oct 2010 11:10
    Item ID: 446
    URI: http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/446

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