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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.