Concept
Adaptation
Overview
evolutionary biological process that fits organisms to their environment, adaptive trait, or state reached by an evolving population
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
The tyranny of this idiosyncrasy, however, results in the theory of "adaptation" being pushed forward into the van of the argument, exploited; adaptation--that means to say, a second-class activity, a mere capacity for "reacting"; in fact, life itself has been defined (by Herbert Spencer) as an increasingly effective internal adaptation to external circumstances. This definition, however, fails to realise the real…
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals The Complete Works, Volume Thirteen, edited by Dr. Oscar Levy.
Names Adaptation several times; states what Adaptation is.
So understood, the process gone through by every unfolding organism will consist, partly in the direct adaptation of its elements to their several circumstances, and partly in the assumption of characters resulting from analogous adaptations of the elements of all ancestral organisms.
Herbert Spencer, Essays
Names Adaptation several times; states what Adaptation is.
It is really the second which serves the usual practice of science, but it is the first that generally provides its philosophy. In any _particular_ case one talks as if the process of adaptation were an effort of the organism to build up a machine capable of turning external circumstances to the best possible account: then one speaks of adaptation _in general_ as if it were the very impress of circumstances…
Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution
Names Adaptation several times; states what Adaptation is.
Philosophers who discussed Adaptation
Related ideas
- Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
- Princeton University Press
- Homeostasis
- Jean-Baptiste Lamarck
- Philosophy of biology
- Habitat
- Learning
- Fitness (biology)
- Organism
- Mutation
- Natural selection
- Natural theology
- Species
- Best of all possible worlds
- Plato
- Stephen Jay Gould
- Instinct
- Empirical evidence
- Aristotle
- Voltaire
- Elliott Sober
- William Paley
- Richard Lewontin
- Evolutionary biology
Opposing perspectives
Place in the tradition
Part of Consciousness.