An interesting 1987 paper by this year’s physics Nobel laureate Geoffrey E. Hinton, and Steven J. Nowlan:
Many organisms learn useful adaptations during their lifetime. These adaptations are often the result of an exploratory search which tries out many possibilities in order to discover good solutions. It seems very wasteful not to make use of the exploration performed by the phenotype to facilitate the evolutionary search for good genotypes. The obvious way to achieve this is to transfer information about the acquired characteristics back to the genotype. Most biologists now accept that the Lamarckian hypothesis is not substantiated; some then infer that learning cannot guide the evolutionary search. We use a simple combinatorial argument to show that this inference is incorrect and that learning can be very effective in guiding the search, even when the specific adaptations that are learned are not communicated to the genotype. In difficult evolutionary searches which require many possibilities to be tested in order to discover a complex co-adaptation, we demonstrate that each learning trial can be almost as helpful to the evolutionary search as the production and evaluation of a whole new organism. This greatly increases the efficiency of evolution because a learning trial is much faster and requires much less expenditure of energy than the production of a whole organism.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.