Baldwin effect

The Baldwin effect is a process in which learning or other acquired behavior changes selection pressures, potentially favoring inherited traits that make the behavior easier to develop.

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Phenotypic plasticity: The capacity of one genotype to produce different phenotypes in response to environmental conditions. Learning is one form of flexibility that can help organisms survive before genetic adaptation occurs.
James Mark Baldwin: An American psychologist and philosopher who developed an early account of how learning can influence evolution. His 1896 account supplied the mechanism later named the Baldwin effect.
Niche construction: The process by which organisms modify their environments in ways that affect selection pressures. Learned behavior can alter environments and thereby change the pressures acting on later generations.
Evolution of learning: The evolutionary emergence and diversification of capacities to acquire information through experience. The Baldwin effect raises the question of when learning itself evolves in response to changing environments.
Genetic assimilation: The evolution of an initially environmentally induced phenotype into one expressed without the original environmental trigger. It is a possible outcome when selection favors inherited traits that replace a learned response.
Conwy Lloyd Morgan: A British psychologist and zoologist known for work on animal behavior and evolutionary theory. He independently described a similar role for behavioral plasticity in evolutionary change.
Cultural evolution: Change over time in socially transmitted information, practices, and institutions. The effect is often invoked to explain feedback between cultural practices and biological evolution.
Cultural niche construction: The alteration of environments by socially transmitted behaviors and technologies. Its feedback with genetic evolution can resemble Baldwinian change while involving cultural inheritance.
Natural selection: A change in heritable trait frequencies caused by differences in survival or reproduction. The Baldwin effect operates through selection on inherited variation, not inheritance of learned traits.
Henry Fairfield Osborn: An American paleontologist who proposed that acquired responses could guide evolutionary adaptation. His 1896 formulation was another contemporary version of the effect.