Parental Guidance Suggested: How Parental Imprinting Evolves Through Sexual Selection as an Adaptive Learning Mechanism

The study of adaptive behavior, including learning, usually centers on the effects of natural selection for individual survival. But because reproduction is evolutionarily more important than survival, sexual selection through mate choice (Darwin, 1871) can also have profound consequences on the evolution of creatures' bodies and behaviors. This article shows, through simulation models, how one type of learning-parental imprinting—can evolve purely through sexual selection, to help in selecting appropriate mates and in tracking changes in the phenotypic makeup of the population across generations. At moderate mutation rates, when population tracking becomes an important but still soluble problem, imprinting proves more useful and evolves more quickly than at low or high mutation rates. We also show that parental imprinting can facilitate the formation of new species. In reviewing the biological literature on imprinting, we note that these results confirm some previous speculations by other researchers concerning the adaptive functions and evolutionary consequences of imprinting. Finally, we discuss how sexual selection through mate choice may have great scientific implications for our understanding of the interactions among evolution, learning, and behavior, and potentially important engineering applications for increasing the efficiency of evolutionary search and optimization methods.