Adaptation

For the 2002 Film, see Adaptation (film) In biology, an adaptation, also called an adaptive trait, is a trait with a current functional role in the life of an organism that is maintained and evolved by means of natural selection. Quotes Culture is our most important biological adaptation. David Barash, The Whisperings Within (New York: Harper & Row, 1979), p. 241 We must alter theory to adapt it to nature, but not nature to adapt it to theory. Claude Bernard, An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (1865), trans. Henry Copley Greene (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927), p. 39 It is not necessarily those lands which are the most fertile or most favoured in climate that seem to me the happiest, but those in which a long struggle of adaptation between man and his environment has brought out the best qualities of both. T. S. Eliot, After Strange Gods (London: Faber and Faber, 1934), p. 17 People think that they have no right to judge a fact — all they have to do is to accept it. Thus from the moment that technics, the State, or production, are facts, we must worship them as facts, and we must try to adapt ourselves to them. This is the very heart of modern religion, the religion of the established fact, the religion on which depend the lesser religions of the dollar, race, or the proletariat, which are only expressions of the great modern divinity, the Moloch of fact. Jacques Ellul, The Presence of the Kingdom (1948), p. 37 According to Darwin's Origin of Species it is not the most intellectual of the species that survives; it is not the strongest that survives; but the species that survives is the one that is best able to adapt and adjust to the changing environment in which it finds itself. Leon C. Megginson, "Lessons from Europe for American Business", Southwestern Social Science Quarterly (1963) 44(1): 3–13, at p. 4 Adapt or perish, now as ever, is Nature's inexorable imperative. H. G. Wells, Mind at the End of Its Tether (London: William Heinemann, 1945), p. 19 See also Adaptation (film) Adjustment (psychology) Complex adaptive systems External links