  Hybrid neuro-evolutionary algorithms may be inspired on Darwinian or
Lamarckian evolu- tion. In the case of Darwinian evolution, the Baldwin effect,
that is, the progressive incorporation of learned characteristics to the
genotypes, can be observed and leveraged to improve the search. The purpose of
this paper is to carry out an exper- imental study into how learning can
improve G-Prop genetic search. Two ways of combining learning and genetic
search are explored: one exploits the Baldwin effect, while the other uses a
Lamarckian strategy. Our experiments show that using a Lamarckian op- erator
makes the algorithm find networks with a low error rate, and the smallest size,
while using the Bald- win effect obtains MLPs with the smallest error rate, and
a larger size, taking longer to reach a solution. Both approaches obtain a
lower average error than other BP-based algorithms like RPROP, other evolu-
tionary methods and fuzzy logic based methods
