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A misconcep tion abou t the Baldvvin Effect:Implications for language evolution'Victor M . LongaUniversity of Santiago de Compostela

Many scholars working in the field of language evolution interp ret th e BALDWINEFFECT (i.e. the hypothesis that learned behayiors may become inherited, thusaffecting the direction of evolutionary change) as a powerful evolutionarymechanism . Baldwin's proposal, however, is highly controversial, in that theempirical support for it is far from conclusive. The aim of this article is to criticallyexamine one o fthe main sources of evidence adduced in support ofthe Baldv^rinEffect, namely its alleged parity , as repeated ly assumed in Briscoe's (2000, 2002,2003, 2005) approach to language phylogeny, with WADDINGTON'S GENETICASSIMILATION. It is argued here, however, that Baldwin's and W adding ton'smechanisms are fundamentally different, and that this has important consequencesfor Briscoe's evolutionary mo del.Keywords: Baldwin Effect, genetic assimilation, grammatical assimilation, languageacquisition device, language evolution, n atura l selection, phen otypic plasticity

1. Introduction

In an article (Baldwin 1896; see also Baldwin 1897) published in 1896 inAmerican Naturalist, the psychologist James Mark Baldwin proposed "a newfactor in evolution" which he called ORGANIC SELECTION but which,following Simpson (1953), has come to be generally known as the BALDWIN

' I am grateful to the editor of Folia Linguistica and two anonymous reviewers for

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EFFECT. AS will be more fully discussed in Section 2, implicit in the BaldwinEffect is the view that learning can have an impact on the direction (and thespeed) of evolutionary change, in that learned behaviors acquired in thecourse of an organism's lifetime may become inherited by its offspring. Theevolutiona ry relevance of learning wou ld thu s imp ly that, as Richards (.1987:451) puts it, evolution would work "not as a blind mechanical process but asone governed by mind".Baldvnn's proposal was vigorously opposed in the first half of thetwentieth century by the proponents of the so-called EVOLUTIONARYSYNTHESIS (see Depew 2003),' but in the late 1980s, nearly a century after its

formulation, it became fashionable. More specifically, Hinton & Nowlan's(1987) computer simulation of the Baldwin Effect appeared to demonstratethat it could indeed speed up evolutionary changes,^ a finding that wasenthusiastically received by the leading evolutionary biologist MaynardSmith (1987). At about the same time Richards (1987: Chapter 10) gave anin-depth account of Baldwin's hypothesis, although, unlike Hinton &Nowlan or Maynard Smith, Richards was rather sceptical about itsexplanatory power. A few years later, in an influential paper on languageevolution . Pinker & Bloom (1990) asserted th at th e Baldwin Effect hadplayed a major role in the evolution of the hu m an linguistic capacity.The above-mentioned studies signalled the beginning of a continuedinterest in the Baldwin Effect (see Yamauchi 2004 for a valuable critical

^ The label "evolutionary synthesis" denotes the integration of Charles D arwin'stheory of the evolution of species by natural selection, Gregor Mendel's theory ofgenetics as the basis for biological inheritance, and mathematical populationgenetics. According to the evolutionary synthesis as established in the 1930s and1940s, evolution consists primarily of changes in the frequencies of alleles betweenone generation and another as a result of genetic drift, gene flow and naturalselection.' Subsequent Baldwin Effect computer simulations, such as Ackley & Littman (1992),French & Messinger (1994) or Mayley (1996), arrived at substan tially the sam eresults as H inton & Now lan (1987). It should be noted , thoug h, that H inton &Nowlah admitted from the start that some of the assumptions in their simulationwere biologically unrealistic; for example, the distance between genotype andphenotype was minimal. More recently, Ancel (2000) has developed two modelingsof the Baldwin Effect which focus on phenotypic plasticity (see Section 2 below)

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A misconception about the Baldwin Effect 307survey), to the extent that nowadays many scholars consider it to be anevolutionary mechanism with far-reaching implications and capable ofaccounting for the evolution of complex behaviors. On the assumption thatthere are grounds to consider language as one ofthe most relevant complexbehaviors, the field of LANGUAGE PHYLOGENY has been deeply influenced byBaldwin's ideas. For, as Dennett (2003: 73) puts it: "[a] practice that is bothlearnable (with effort) and highly advantageous once learned can becomemore and more easily learned, can move gradually into the status of notneeding to be learned at all".

As a result, many evolutionary approaches to language (particularly, butnot solely, those which assume a gradualist perspective) agree that theBaldwin Effect has been a leading force in language evolution. Batali (1994),Dennett (1995, 2003), Deacon (1997, 2003), Kirby (1998, 1999), Bickerton(2000), Briscoe (2000, 2002, 2003), Calvin & Bickerton (2000), or Turkel(2002), among o thers, not to m ention Pinker & Bloom's (1990) p aperreferred to above, all adhere to this view. In addition, with the exception ofDeacon they all attach special importance to the mechanism of GENETICASSIMILATION which is an integral component of the Baldwin Effect (seefurther Section 2 below), since genetic assimilation makes it possible forgrammatical characteristics previously acquired through learning to becomeinnately seated.

Yet despite this widespread approval, the Baldwin Effect is also highlycontroversial, since it lacks clear empirical support. Its increasing popularity,therefore, seems to be based on "purely theoretical defenses" (Downes 2003:48).The aim of this paper is to critically discuss one of the main sources ofevidence used to back the Baldwin Effect, namely its conflation with themechanism of genetic assimilation as formulated by the British geneticistConrad Waddington (Waddington 1942, 1953). Within the field of languageevolution, the parity between these two mech anism s has, been repeatedlyargued for by Briscoe (2000, 2002, 2003, 2005), whose views will be discussedfurther on. If it can be determined that Waddington's mechanism of geneticassimilation cannot be used as evidence in support of the Baldwin Effect,then its empirical basis becomes seriously limited.

The structu re o fth e article is as follows. Section 2 provides a brief outlineof the Baldwin Effect. Section 3 summarizes Briscoe's approach to languagephylogeny, with particular reference to the alleged parity between Baldwin's

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308 Victor M. Longamechanisms cannot be conflated, that is to say, why the type of geneticassimilation involved in the Baldwin Effect and in Waddington's mechanismare different kinds of processes; the implications for Briscoe's evolutionarymodel of this lack of correspondence are also briefly d iscussed.2 . An outlin e of the Baldwin Effect

Essentially the Baldwin Effect is a mechanism which speeds up the p rocess ofnatural selection (for discussion see, among others, Turney, Whitley &Anderson 1996 and Godfrey-Smith 2003). It can be broken down into twosteps, the first of which has to do with the property of PHENOTYPICPLASTICITY (see West-Eberhard 2003), which enables an organism to developnew behaviors when exposed to new environmental conditions/ or to adaptitself, through learning, to behaviors observed within the environment (forexample, by mimicking the phenotypic result of a mutation arising in anindiyidual).^ Phenotypic plasticity thus provides the organism with fitness,which in turn enables the organism to stave off extinction. The starting pointof the process is therefore a phe notypic change arising as a consequence of anontogenetic a daptation ma de possible by the o rganism's plasticity. How ever,for th e Baldwin Effect to apply, a second and crucial step is requ ired, nam elythe genetic assimilation of the phenotypic trait previously learned as aresponse to a given stimulus. This step assumes that the plastic learningmechanism for the phenotypic trait is replaced by a rigid mechanism basedon heredity. Because of this, and as already pointed out, the Baldwin Effectpresupposes tha t "learning can guide evolution" (Pink er & Bloom 1990:723). , . _

If the learning of a specific phenotypic trait varies within a population,the result will be that some individuals will be capable of learning that traitbetter than others. Natural selection will favour those who acquire the abilitymore easily (for example, on the basis of limited exposure to the trigger orstim ulus ), because those individuals will increase the ir level of fitness, that is,they will survive and reproduce to a greater extent than those possessing alesser degree of plasticity. Further down the evolutionary line, mutations will

" In fact, phenotypic plasticity may also result in purely physiological adaptations,but these fall outside the scope of the present research.

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A misconception about the Baldwin Effect 309occur (in a non-Lamarckian sense; see belov^) which will produce the sametype of trait without the need for learning, the outcome being the reduction(or ideally, the deletion) of phenotypic plasticity for that particular trait.Therefore, as De nne tt (1995: 78) notes , "[i]n the long run, natu ral selection -redesign at the genotype level - will tend to follow the lead of and confirmthe directions taken by the individual organ ism s' successful explorations -redesign at the individual or phenotype level". In other words, naturalselection will tend to act on plasticity, by confirming and accelerating theevolutionary change which once began via learning. This is the very reasonwhy the Baldwin Effect "genuinely increases the power - locally - of theunderlying process of natural selection wherever it operates" (Dennett 1995:80), and, consequently, speeds up evolution. It should be noted that, for theBaldwin Effect to work, the genotypic landscape should have the sametopology as the ph enotype/learning landscape. Therefore, the Baldwin Effectonly applies if successive mutations moving in a constant direction acrossgenotypic space produce successive improvem ents in learning.

The points made so far are aptly summarized by Godfrey-Smith (2003:54):Suppose a population encounters a new environmental condition, in which itsold behavioral strategies are inappropriate. If some members of the populationare plastic with respect to their behavioral program, and can acquire in thecourse of their timelife new behavioral skills that fit their new surroundings,these plastic individuals will survive and reproduce at the expense of less flexibleindividuals.' The population will then have the chance to produce mutationsthat cause organisms to exhibit the new optimal behavioral profile v^thout theneed for learning. Selection will favor these mutants, and in time the behaviorswhich once had to be learned will be innate.For a full understanding of the implications of the Baldwin Effect it isalso crucial to bear in mind that learning is always a trade-off between thecosts and benefits associated with it. Although learning has undeniableadvantages for organisms, it also has clear disadvantages. For example,learning requires time, attention, and effort. Further, the learned behavior isexposed to dangerous contingent factors, such as mistakes, which might well

' Godfi-ey-Smith (2003: 54) makes the important point that phenotypic plasticity

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310 Victor M. Longabe deleterious. Yet the disadvantages disappear if the learned behaviorbecomes an inherited trait. The Baldwin Effect, therefore, reduces the costs oflearning.To conclude this brief outline of Baldwin's views, a clarification is inorde r c oncern ing step 2 of the Baldwin Effect, which, as noted above, has todo with the genetic assimilation that transforms learned into innate behavior.Although the behavior is in fact inherited by the organism's offspring, thetransfer does no t take place in the way envisaged by Lam arck's (1809) theoryof the inheritance of acquired characteristics. The Lamarckian account ofevolution, or SOFT HEREDITY, involves a DIRECT transfer of learned abilitiesfrom phe notype .to genotype. By contrast, th e genetic assimilation within theBaldwin Effect; proceeds in purely Darwinian fashion and relies on HARDHEREDITY; that is to say, it depends on mutations which are random andNON-DIRECTED. The random nature of mutations, which is central to the.fields of genetics or m olecular biology, is aptly summ arized in Dobzhansk y's(1970: 92; see also Futuym a 1998[1979]: 282) obse rvation that "only a vitalistPangloss could imagine that the genes know how and when it is good forthem to mutate". '

3. Briscoe's approa ch to language phylogenyIn a num be r of recent publication s, Briscoe (2000, 2002, 2003, 2005) has putforward a highly interesting approach to language phylogeny which arguesfor the emergence and maintenance of a LANGUACE ACQUISITION DEVICE(henceforth, LAD; cf. Chomsky 1965) via genetic assimilation, that is to say,via the m echanism referred to so far as the Baldwin Effect.

Briscoe's proposal is based on a very simple idea: since communicativesuccess is advantageous in terms of an increased fitness level, we could expectthe language learning period to be replaced by more effective acquisitionprocedures which do not crucially depend on environmental stimulus andthus facilitate a more rapid acquisition. More specifically, Briscoe (2005: 312)speculates that an initial language acquisition procedure emerged viarecruitment or EXAPTATION of preexisting "general-purpose learningmechanisms to a specifically-linguistic cognitive representation capable of

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A misconception about the Baldwin Effect 311expressing mappings from decomposable meaning representations torealisable, essentially linearised, encodings of such representations". AsBriscoe (2005: 313) notes, the selective pressure favouring such adevelopment and its subsequent maintenance is only possible "if someprotolanguage(s) had already emerged within a hom inid popu lation".

The protolanguage(s) in question are hypothesized to have initiallyconsisted of complete, propositional messages conveyed by undecomposable,holistic signals. However, in order to create selection pressure for theemergence and evolution of grammar, protolanguage(s) must have evolvedat some point into no n-holistic, decomposable structures. At that p oint,when the environment contains language(s) with minimal syntax, geneticassimilation of grammatical information becomes adaptive, under theassumption that mastery of language confers a fitness advantage on its users,since genetic assimilation will make grammatical acquisition more rapid andreliable. (Briscoe 2005: 313)'

This outline of Briscoe's evolutionary approach, though necessarily brief,testifies to its merits and interest. Yet it will be argued in the remainder ofthis paper that one of the central aspects of Briscoe's account, namely hisviews regarding the genetic assimilation of gramm atical information into theLAD, is untenable.

As already pointe d o ut in Section 1, despite the popularity ofthe BaldwinEffect among scholars working in the field of language evolution, thismechanism remains highly controversial, since clear supporting evidence forit is lacking. Even adherents of Baldwin's hypothesis, such as French &Messinger (1994: 277), recognize that it "is still veiled in controversy", andDeacon (2003: 89) points ou t that it has not yet achieved the status of a well-accepted biological phenomenon. Critical comments should therefore notcom e as a surprise, as when Dow nes (2003: 33) points ou t that "there are no tsufficient grounds to add the Baldwin Effect to our evolutionary explanatoryrepertoire", because "there are no good examples of robust empiricalph enom enon [sic] that exemplify this mech anism in action" (ibid.: 49).

' The same mechanism is assumed by Briscoe in order to account for parametricvalues (for discussion see Briscoe 2002): parametric values, which at first were

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312 Victor M. LongaIn view of the above, Briscoe's staunch defence of genetic assimilation asa driving force in language evolution seems unexpected. He not only asserts

(2003: 295) that "genetic assimilation is the most plausible account of [theL A D ' S ] emergence and maintenance", but further argues that "the onus is[...] on non-assimilationists to propose a detailed, plausible alternativemechanism for the evolution o fthe LAD" (ibid.: 295 -296).

The question to be asked is, therefore, why does Briscoe believe thatgenetic assimilation as envisaged in the Baldwin Effect can be legitimatelyused as the best explanatory m echanism of language evolution? The answer isa simple one : he equates the Baldwin Effect with W add ing ton 's (1942, 1953)related mechanism of genetic assimilation, and hence assumes that theexperiments undertaken by Waddington can provide empirical support forthe Baldwin Effect itself. Briscoe is not the only scholar who argues for thisconflation (see Section 4 below), bu t he is undoub tedly the only one to havestated it so explicitly. Thus he claims that

Waddington's work on genetic assimilation is a neo-Darwinian refinement of anidea independently discovered by Baldwin, Lloyd Morgan and Osborne in 1896,and often referred to as the Baldwin Effect. (Briscoe 2000: 251, footnote 8)See also Briscoe (2002: 283, 2003: 300-301, footnote 3). However, Briscoe'sline of reasoning rests on a false premise: Waddington's mechanism cannotbe used to prove the existence ofthe Baldwin Effect, because Waddington'sgenetic assimilation differs in important ways from the kind of geneticassimilation at work in the Baldwin Effect. Accordingly, the two cannot beconflated. T he next section w ill try to make clear why.4. W addington's genetic assimilation is not equivalent to Baldwin's

genetic assimilationIn a series of experiments, Waddington (1953) exposed pupae of a wild-typestrain of Drosophila melanogaster to an unnaturally high temperature.Following this environmental heat shock, the flies that emerged showedvarious abnormal phenotypic changes, but Waddington decided toarbitrarily focus on those flies having a "crossveinlessness-like" phenotype'

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A misconception about the Baldwin Effect 313

and went on to practise an artificial selection (i.e. controlled by himself) inwhich the abnormal flies were isolated from the rest and allowed toreproduce among themselves. This artificial selection was repeated downthrough several generations, each generation being exposed to the same heatshock and selection process. Beginning around generation 14, some flies inthe selected strain had missing crossveins even when the pupae had not beenexposed to the abnormal environment (the heat shock). In other words, atthis stage crossveinlessness had become GENETICALLY ASSIMILATED, i.e. it hadbecome an inherited character whose development was no longer dependenton the heat treatment. To quote Waddington (1953: 125):

If an aninial subjected to unusual environmental conditions develops someabnormal phenotype which is advantageous under those circumstances,selection will not merely increase the frequency with which this favourable resultoccurs, but will also tend to stabilise the formation of it, and the newdevelopment may become so strongly canalised that it continues to occur evenwhen the environment returns to normal.On the surface, it would appear that this process is analogous to the type

of genetic assimilation operating in the Baldwin Effect, in whichenvironmentally induced traits are also genetically assimilated and becomeinnate. The parity between Baldwin's and Waddington's types of geneticassimilation has in fact been widely assumed in the literature, as alreadypointed out in Section 3 above. Turney, Whitley & Anderson (1996: iv)assert, for instance, that the Baldwin Effect "is similar to Waddington's(1942) 'canalization'"; see also Hinton & Nowlan (1987: 495), Weber &Depew (2003: x), HaU (2003: 146) and Yamauchi (2004: 31). Other scholars,such as Dawkins (1999[1982)],' Maynard-Smith & Szathmary (1995: 292),Hofftneyer (2003: 338) or Tallerman (2005: 6), not to mention Briscoehimself, consider both processes to be fully equivalent.

However, there is a crucial difference between the Baldwin Effect andWaddington's genetic assimilation. The starting-point of the Baldwin Effectis a phenotypic change, which implies that "the initial adaptation to the newenvironment [is] a NONGENETIC phenomenon on which selection has no

' I am indebted to an anonymous Folia Linguistica reviewer for bringing to myattention.Dawkins's influential conflation of Baldwin's and Waddington's theories,

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314 Victor M. Longa

effect" ( W ad di ng to n 1975: 89; em pha sis add ed ). Fr om this i t follows that forthe genetic assimilation of the Baldwin Effect to apply, a random mutation isrequired. By contras t , in Waddington 's genet ic ass imila t ion a genet icvar ia t ion which had previously exis ted in the or iginal populat ion a t thegenotype level remains "hidden" unt i l an adminis tered shock br ings i t tolight: the shock "destabilizes a developmental system and reveals geneticvar ia t ion that was previously concealed" (W add ing ton 1962: 22 6-2 27 ) . Theheat shock, however , does not change genes; i t s imply causes nongenet icchanges that upset development:

There is genetic variability, in this respect, available within any norm ally variablestrain [.. .]. It is undeniable th at such variability existed after th e first genera tionof treatm ent, since responses to selection began imm ediately. [...] It is, ofcourse, possible to suggest that the high temperature treatment has itselfstimulated the occurrence of new mutations tending to cause crossveinlessness,but there are several points to be mentioned in connection with such ahypo thesis. In the first place, the polygenic nature of the differences between thestrains would imply that m any new m utations would be necessary; secondly, thenum ber of individuals in each generation was so large that new mu tations couldnot have been concentrated in the comparatively small number of generationsunless each mutation has occurred simultaneously in a fair number ofindividuals. [...] Since there are not [sic] considerations w hich force us topostulate the occurrence of any new mutations at all, it does not seem necessaryto pursue the argument any further. (Waddington 1953: 124; see alsoWaddington 1956)

The outcomes of both types of genetic assimilation thus differ markedly. Inthe case of the Baldwin Effect, natural selection favors the relevant geneticmutat ions that t ransform a learned into an innate behavior , as a resul t ofwhich the plas t ic mechanism is replaced by a r igid heredi tary mechanism. InWaddington ' s p rocess , on the con t ra ry , changed envi ronmenta l condi t ionsunmask pre-exis t ing genet ic var ia t ion which ul t imately leads to the creat ion,through natural se lect ion, of a new al ternat ive phenotype."

In neo-Darwinism all genetic variation ultimately stems from mutation. ThisappHes also to Waddington's pre-existing genetic variation. However, there is acrucial difference between V^addington's and Baldwin's mechanisms as regards the

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A misconception about the Baldwin Effect 315It follows from the above that Waddington's findings cannot be resortedto in order to provide empirical support for the Baldwin Effect.'^ Even more

importantly, the profound differences between both mechanisms poseserious problems for Briscoe's (2000, 2002, 2003, 2005) evolutionary model.This, as already noted, relies on the genetic assimilation of gramniatical traitswhich were previously acquired via learning (exactly as in Baldwin'sconception of genetic assimilation). Waddington's conception of geneticassimilation, by contrast, implies that grammatical properties would need tobe related to a pre-existing genetic, variation which, in W add ingto n'sterminology, is then CANALIZED to p rod uce an alternative pheno type; bu t thetrait or traits are not required to become innate, they are simply canalizedgenetically. And th is, clearly, is not w hat Briscoe has in m ind .5. Concluding remarks " ,To conclude, I hope to have demonstrated that the Baldwin Effect cannot beconflated with Waddington's mechanism of genetic assimilation, and that,therefore, evidence based on Waddington's experiments cannot be used tosupport Baldwin's evolutionary hypothesis. More generally, the precedingdiscussion is in line vwth Downes's (2003) view quoted earlier in this paperthat the explanatory power of the Baldwin Effect in the field of languagephylogeny has been overemphasized. Einally, the fact that clear empiricalevidence for the Baldwin Effect is still lacking also seems to call into questionBriscoe's (2003: 295) claim that "genetic assimilation is the most plausibleaccount of [the LAD's] emergence and maintenance".

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Author's addressDepartment of Spanish Literature, Literary Theoryand Linguistics

Facultad de FilologiaUniversidad de Santiago de Com postela 15782 Santiago de Com postela, Spain Received: 21 M arch 2006e-mail: fevlonga@usc.es Revised: 24 May 2006

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