From PhilPapers forum Philosophy of Biology:

2010-08-24
Epigenetic evolution and neo-Lamarckianism
Reply to Haines Brown
Haines:

Like Jo, I am not clear where you are going with this. Here is a menu of thoughts.

1. Posing the conundrum about the eye is a bit of a red flag, since this is a favourite example of creationists; yet, I thought it had long been solved. (I don't know the details of eye-development or evolution, though; so I won't stick my oar in about it.) But there is no general problem about the evolution of complexity, which is why I don't understand the puzzle about the evolution of flexible behaviour patterns. Maybe you could spell it out with an example.

2. Again, I don't myself believe in "emergence" unless it is a name for something quite non-mysterious like my example of the rabbit in my last post. Broad thought that water "emerged" from hydrogen and oxygen, but his quite unconvincing reason was that the properties of water cannot be predicted from those of hydrogen and oxygen. On that understanding of emergence, natural selection is emergent all the time. (The supervenience talk can be taken as legislating emergence away -- so your take on it is right, I think, though I draw the opposite conclusion from it.)

3. On the other hand, some of the things you say sound very like evo-devo: the evolution of developmental patterns. Some of the evo-devo people, Richard Goodwin, for example, think that it appeals to influences other than natural selection -- Chomsky used to be in this camp as well. Others, like Sean Carroll, think that these sorts of constraints are part of natural selection -- his book is marvelous on the topic of gene-regulation, homeobox genes, etc. -- that's my view as well, development is the product of selection.

4. On the Baldwin effect, it is not what you are looking for. Here's the idea. Take a learned behaviour B. B is advantageous, but not innate. Sometimes, though, B will pop up in the population as the result of a mutation. Because it is advantageous the newly mutated gene for B is selected for. This selected-for behaviour displaces the learned behaviour because it is more reliably expressed.

Lamarckianism is where a gene for behaviour B arises as a result of an organism evincing B. The Baldwin effect is not an example of this.

best,

Mohan