Download the peirce-baldwin effect and its contemporary significance

THE PEIRCE-BALDWIN EFFECT AND ITS CONTEMPORARY SIGNIFICANCE
Abstract
The Baldwin Effect has recently re-emerged as a serious theoretical context within which the
relevance of learning and phenotypic plasticity not only to congenital instincts but also to
germinal and genetic adaptive factors has returned to the scene of socio-cultural vis-à-vis
biological evolution (see e.g. Weber & Depew 2003). The ‘post-Modern’ Extended Synthesis
(Pigliucci 2010) is currently underwriting many of the late-19th century Darwin re-interpreters.
First, I will focus on two such re-interpretations, James M. Baldwin’s 1896 theory of organic
selection, ontogenetic adaptation, and social heritability, and Charles Peirce’s agapastic, nonLamarckian and anti-Spencerian evolution sketched in his “Evolutionary Love” (1893). I will
argue that, in interpreting the agape as co-ordinated interaction, we can find the BaldwinLloyd Morgan Effect at play in Peirce’s article. He could thus make the priority claim as regards
to the overall idea. Second, the general mechanism of learning specific behavioural traits,
which variously has been argued to be manifested for instance in genetic assimilation or niche
construction, is in Peirce’s agapasm a “generalising tendency” that can be “energetically
projaculated” but not congenitally inherited. Such tendencies are the “habits of acting”,
where the “self control” that organisms perform upon the habits can result in phenotypic
rigidity favoured by biological evolution (‘learning costs’). This, in a nutshell, is Peirce’s overall
logical theory of the meaning of intellectual signs, pragmaticism. Habits of acting in a certain
way in certain kinds of situations are congenial to what rationality is: the rational being is one
who will act so as to attain certain ends (“Prevent his doing so in one way, and he will act in
some utterly different way which will produce the same result”, CP 7.361).
Some systematic and historical implications are imminent. I will point out two of them here: (i)
Terrence Deacon’s (1997) appropriation of Peirce’s theory of signs on the one hand, and
Baldwin’s theory of evolution to the evolutionary emergence of language one the other, can
be conceptually bridged by pragmaticism’s key notion of self-controlled habits of action as
stable tendencies to learn a specific task. The both sides – the growth of self-controlled
interactive habits and stable tendencies to learn – are consistent with Deacon’s “shifts in
communicative strategies”, which I will explain within the contemporary mathematical
framework of evolutionary game theory with the Baldwin Effect incorporated. (ii) Peirce and
Baldwin were close colleagues who were contesting on coming up with respectable scientific
re-interpretations of Darwin’s theory. “Evolutionary Love” was not a white elephant but a
natural follow-up on the laboratory-trained scientist’s works such as “The Guess at the Riddle”
and as his 1876 mathematical and statistical work on the cost-benefit analysis in political
economy (Peirce W4: 72-78, “The Triad in Biological Development”, W6: 199-202, “Note on
the Theory of the Economy of Research”). Unlike Baldwin, however, Peirce understood what
was to become the modern synthesis of evolution quite correctly: that evolutionary success
concerns creative selections and is measured by statistical reproduction rates relative to
reference populations.
References
Baldwin, Mark James (1896). “A New Factor in Evolution”, American Naturalist 30, 441–451,
536–553.
Deacon, Terrence W. (1997). The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the
Brain, New York: W.W. Norton.
Peirce, Charles S. (1893). “Evolutionary Love”, The Monist, 3, 176-200.
Peirce, Charles S. (1931–58). Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. 8 volumes. Ed. by
Charles Hartshorne, Paul Weiss, and A. W. Burks. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Cited as CP x.yyy.
Peirce, Charles S. (1984-). Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A Chronological Edition, Volumes 1-8,
Peirce Edition Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Cited as Wx.
Pigliucci, M. and Müller, G. B. (eds.), (2010). Evolution: The Extended Synthesis, Cambridge,
Mass.: MIT Press.
Weber, Bruce H. and Depew, David J. (eds.). (2003). Evolution and Learning: The Baldwin
Effect Reconsidered, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.