  The environment is known to affect the formation and evolution of galaxies
considerably best visible through the well-known morphology-density
relationship. We study the effect of environment on the evolution of early-type
galaxies for a sample of 3,360 galaxies morphologically selected by visual
inspection from the SDSS in the redshift range 0.05<z<0.06, and analyse
luminosity-weighted age, metallicity, and alpha/Fe ratio as function of
environment and galaxy mass. We find that on average 10 per cent of early-type
galaxies are rejuvenated through minor recent star formation. This fraction
increases with both decreasing galaxy mass and decreasing environmental
density. However, the bulk of the population obeys a well-defined scaling of
age, metallicity, and alpha/Fe ratio with galaxy mass that is independent of
environment. Our results contribute to the growing evidence in the recent
literature that galaxy mass is the major driver of galaxy formation. Even the
morphology-density relationship may actually be mass-driven, as the consequence
of an environment dependent characteristic galaxy mass coupled with the fact
that late-type galaxy morphologies are more prevalent in low-mass galaxies.
