Cooperation as well as learning: A commentary on 'How learning can guide evolution' by Hinton and Nowlan

Abstract

According to the Baldwin Effect learning can guide evolution. This does not suppose that information about what has been learned is transferred back into the genetic code: in the Baldwin Effect complex multi-gene characteristics are discovered through learning but acquired through standard selectionist evolutionary processes. Learning serves to improve the search by giving value to a partial, and otherwise useless, subset of the required genes. An elegant and concrete treatment of the Baldwin Effect is given in 'How learning can guide evolution', a 1987 paper by G. E. Hinton and S. J. Nowlan. This includes a simple, but revealing, simulation illustrating the effect. As a commentary on that paper, a similar simulation is used here to demonstrated that cooperation can also guide evolution. Like learning, cooperation has a clear benefit to survival, but what is proposed here is small addition: that cooperation, like learning in the Baldwin Effect, can also allow complex characteristic to be discovered and acquired much faster than they otherwise would. This suggests an additional benefit of social behavior and suggests that social animals have a broader evolutionary path towards some complex adaptations.