As a species develops it is molded by its environment.
Evolution alters the species so as to adapt it to the environment in which it resides.
Unfortunately evolution is a slow process and cannot adapt a species quickly in the event of a sudden environmental change. To this extent creatures have the capacity to learn so as to adopt the most appropriate behaviour to best suit the creature within it environment. This abilty to learn can affect the species' evolution as it means that if some aspect of the species' environment is not encoded into its dna then it can learn it during the course of its life. It is however inefficient for every generation to learn the same things from scratch as the previous generations had to. To solve this problem several theories were presented.