Adaptation
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In biology, adaptation has three related meanings. Firstly, it is the dynamic evolutionary process 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.
Organisms face a succession of environmental challenges as they grow, and show adaptive plasticity as traits develop in response to the imposed conditions. This gives them resilience to varying environments.
See also
- Adaptation (disambiguation)
- Adaptive evolution in the human genome
- Adaptive memory
- Adaptive mutation
- Adaptive system
- Anti-predator adaptation
- Body reactivity
- Ecological trap
- Evolutionary pressure
- Evolvability
- Intragenomic conflict
- Neutral theory of molecular evolution
Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Adaptation" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.
