adaptation
Sign in to saveIn biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process. Thirdly, it is a phenotypic trait or adaptive trait, with a functional role in each individual organism, that is maintained and has evolved through natural selection.
AI overview
Adaptation is the evolutionary process through which organisms develop traits that help them survive and reproduce in their environment, as well as the physical or behavioral characteristics themselves that result from this process. It matters because it explains how living things become suited to their surroundings and how populations change over time through natural selection.
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Article
23 sectionsContents
- History
- General principles
- What adaptation is
- What adaptation is not
- Adaptedness and fitness
- Types
- Changes in habitat
- Genetic change
- Co-adaptation
- Mimicry
- Trade-offs
- Examples
- Shifts in function
- Pre-adaptation
- Co-option of existing traits: exaptation
- Niche construction
- Non-adaptive traits
- Extinction and coextinction
- Origin of adaptive capacities
- Philosophical issues
- See also
- References
- Sources
In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process of natural selection that fits organisms to their environment, enhancing their evolutionary fitness. Secondly, it is a state reached by the population during that process. Thirdly, it is a phenotypic trait or adaptive trait, with a functional role in each individual organism, that is maintained and has evolved through natural selection.
Historically, adaptation has been described from the time of the ancient Greek philosophers such as Empedocles and Aristotle. In 18th and 19th-century natural theology, adaptation was taken as evidence for the existence of a deity. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace proposed instead that it was explained by natural selection.