the Baldwin effect

In biology, the "Baldwin effect" is the result of the interaction of evolution with learning by individual animals over their lifetime. It turns out that individual learning tends to enhance evolutionary learning at the species level. The effect is named after J. Mark Baldwin, an American naturalist who described it in 1896.

In machine learning, the Baldwin effect means that you may be able to improve the results of an evolutionary algorithm by applying it to systems that themselves learn.

references

A new factor in evolution
J. Mark Baldwin
The original paper, which is unfortunately no longer online.

The Baldwin Effect: A Bibliography
Peter Turney
Web page. A fantastic resource on the Baldwin effect from the point of view of machine learning.