Definition
“Adaptation” may name a process or a state, can be used in physiological or evolutionary contexts, and concerns organisms or traits. An individual organism has abilities to physiologically adapt to its environment, for example, by changing the values of some parameters of its metabolism (pulse, body temperature, etc.). Its being adapted is the result of such physiological process. In evolutionary biology, it may be useful to talk of adaptedness of organisms, namely, their being adjusted to their environments, and of traits themselves as adaptations. Adaptedness is always relative to an environment. Traits as adaptations, fitness and adaptedness of organisms are basically related by natural selection; namely, the process by which the more adapted organisms, having higher chances of survival and reproduction (i.e., higher fitness), on the average leave more offspring and hence increase the frequency of their heritable traits in the next generations and finally lead to the...
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References
Brandon R (1990) Adaptation and environment. MIT Press, Cambridge
Burian R (2005 [1983]) Adaptation. In: Burian R (ed) The epistemology of development, evolution, and genetics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 54–80
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Huneman, P. (2013). Adaptation. In: Dubitzky, W., Wolkenhauer, O., Cho, KH., Yokota, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Systems Biology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9863-7_896
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9863-7_896
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