Concept
Fitness (biology)
Overview
quantitative representation of natural and sexual selection within evolutionary biology
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.
So that not only does the definition, as thus expressed, comprehend all those activities, bodily and mental, which constitute our ordinary idea of Life; but it also comprehends both those processes of development by which the organism is brought into general fitness for such activities, and those after-processes of adaptation by which it is specially fitted to its special activities. Nevertheless, so abstract a…
Herbert Spencer, The Principles of Biology, Volume 1
The author is tied to Fitness in the knowledge graph; names Fitness.
Along with that remarkable process which, beginning in minute forms with what is called conjugation, developed into sexual generation, there came into play causes of frequent and marked fortuitous variations. The mixtures of constitutional proclivities made more or less unlike by unlikenesses of physical conditions, inevitably led to occasional concurrences of forces producing deviations of structure.
Herbert Spencer, The Factors of Organic Evolution
States what Fitness is; the author is tied to Fitness in the knowledge graph.
At the same time, a mere approximation to this exact point will protect him from destruction. There is, in consequence, a certain scope within the limits of exactness and fitness of this so-called proportion. The normal proportion is as follows.
Arthur Schopenhauer, Essays of Schopenhauer
Names Fitness several times; opens on Fitness.
Related ideas
- Mutation
- Natural selection
- Herbert Spencer
- United Kingdom
- Survival of the fittest
- Kin selection
- Charles Darwin
- Darwinism
- Modern synthesis (20th century)
- Phenotype
Place in the tradition
Part of Consciousness.