Forgotten forerunners: Baldwin's evolutionary epistemology

Culture changes and develops through time. This much had already been gauged and proposed in myriad ways well before Darwin. However, even after Darwin the nature of culture’s development through time and space, as well as the relationship between biological and cultural evolution, remained highly controversial to say the least (e.g.

As we have already seen, Darwinian evolution is actually built on a five-fold understanding of the evolutionary process (see Chapter 3, §The Origin of Species, 1859). In addition to these conceptual pillars, Ernst Mayr listed several other equally important corollaries of Darwin’s theory, including the role of ‘effects of use and disuse’ on the organism and on the inheritance of acquired characters (Mayr 1991: 35). Such specific corollary was proved wrong after the rediscovery of Mendelian genetics: the transmission of characters is based upon blind, often slow, genetic inheritance of units of information unaffected by life changes (i.e. non-Lamarckian) and later filtered by external factors (see Mesoudi 2011: 40). The original Darwinian theory of evolution has been continuously corrected and updated, maintaining almost untouched its original five-fold core, becoming one of the most resilient and fruitful research programmes ever conceived by humankind (Pievani 2011). Thanks to such ongoing consilient work, the chasm between micro-evolution (genetics) and macro-evolution (palaeontology) was slowly bridged in the mid-twentieth century with the so-called Neo-Darwinian synthesis (Raup and Jablonski 1986; Sepkoski and Ruse 2010).

However, in 1896 US psychologist James M. Baldwin (1861-1934) had already proposed an evolutionary mechanism which bypassed these constraints, and went even further. The mechanism of ‘organic evolution', presented by Baldwin as a ‘new factor in evolution', and later called the Baldwin Effect, describes how the ‘environmentally elicited individual phenotypic adaptations might come under genotypic control and hence [be] transmitted via inheritance to offspring' (Plotkin 2004: 77; Baldwin 1896). In other words, behavioural changes produced by learning during the growth stages of the life history of an organism (i.e. ontogeny) have a selective impact on individual habits (e.g. diet) which, in the long run, produce genetic adaptations. The Baldwin effect dispenses with simple Lamarckian explanations of use and disuse and provides an evolutionary and psychological explanation of how learning mechanisms help to develop cultures which, in turn, help to cope with the environment. Adaptive learning is the keyword here, as it contributes to actively imitating, selecting and adopting behaviours that may have a positive influence on one organism's fitness (that is, the chance to pass its genes to the next generation), and therefore leaving a substantial modified cultural niche to its progeny via ‘social heredity', and so on.

What is a cultural niche? As far as human beings are involved, the cultural niche is the result of the peculiar human cognitive prowess. To paraphrase White's definition, it is folk-sciencing writ large: the ability to accumulate knowledge and modify natural and social environments, thereby changing the selective pressures thanks to problem­solving, cooperation, imaginative thinking and abstract reasoning (Pinker 2010; Boyd, Richerson and Henrich 2011; for niche construction theory, see Kendal et al. 2011). Religious ideas and behaviours might be pivotal elements for change insofar as the implementation of several technologies, cognitive skills and normative rules (e.g. writing, philological tools, numeracy, marriage rules, etc.) contribute to overcoming social and ecological problems or even modifying the societal selective pressures on individuals (e.g. Purzycki and Sosis 2013).

In 1909, Baldwin published Darwin and the Humanities, designed as a consilient interdisciplinary manifesto (Baldwin 1909). In it, Baldwin anticipated the most basic assumption behind the cultural niche and intuited its potential to bridge the gap between nature and culture. He developed what would be later called a fully fledged evolutionary epistemology, that is, a Darwinian selectionist account of how ideas are transmitted and adopted and how they impact on biology.³ Evolutionary epistemology was thought by Baldwin to be the result of the interaction between two factors:

1. the ontogenetic phase of ‘ejective consciousness', in which a child develops the cognitive skills which allow her to ‘understand that others have subjective mental states too, and that such understanding is the basis for entering into a community of shared knowledge';

2. the inter-personal mental ‘“environment of thought” in which ideas are subjected to variation, are selected, and then transmitted and hence conserved' (Plotkin 2004: 76-7).

Within this framework, Baldwin re-contextualized religion as a most important environment of thought: religion provides ‘tribal or national self-consciousness' and personal meaning wrapped in a social institution ‘handed down by “social heredity” ', and supported by symbolic and anthropomorphic thinking, problem-solving social imagination, kin recognition and inter-personal psychological projection (Baldwin 1909: 101, 95, 107, 98).