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Krasnow Institute > Monday Seminars > Abstracts IS BEHAVIORAL PLASTICITY AN ADAPTATION?: WHAT INDIVIDUAL AND GROUP DIFFERENCES IN SKILL MIGHT HAVE TO SAY Dennis K. McBride, Ph.D. It is accepted that perceptuomotor skills contribute to the survival, and thus of the reproductive success of organisms. Skill is typically characterized as the convergence of control (precision) and motor (power) components of skeletal muscle activity that appear to be goal-directed. Skill arises from inherited capacities, rewarded practice (i.e., it is plasticial), or from some arguable combination of inheritance and practice. To the extent that skill is learned, the theoretical question arises as to the biological provenance of learning, and of its conveyance to succeeding generations. That is, is plasticity itself an evolutionary adaptation? Much has been written about a "Baldwin Effect"--a path by which learning may become heritable. From a clearly Darwinistic perspective--if and only if--the biological benefits of learning significantly exceed their associated costs, only then does the probability increase that learning per se will be selected and perpetuated from generation to next. Implied from this are within-species variabilities in learning ability (i.e., individual and perhaps sex differences), and phylogenic graduation or at least variability. What is not clear are (1) the relationships of cost to benefit, (2) the procatenative arrangement between changes in morphology and changes in skill (i.e., which came first, the woodpecker's beak, or its skill at plucking insects), and (3) the roles played by natural and sexual selection in the evolution of skill. This research attempts to broach the (putative) descent of plasticity by examining the contribution of combining experimental and differential psychological techniques. The effort addresses individual and sex differences in perceptuomotor learning and performance, invokes a simple (Spearhead's) model of motor and control co-evolution (as outlined by John Watkins and Sir Karl Popper), and begins to bring forward novel methods which may offer insight into the adaptive status of learning.
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