Adaptability

“ But now, as to the phenomenon of variation or adaptation in general, we must, as in the case of inheritance, view it as a quite universal, physiological fundamental quality of all organisms, without exception—as a manifestation of life which cannot be separated from the idea of organism. Strictly speaking, we must here also, as in the case of inheritance, distinguish between Adaptation itself and Adaptability. ”

“ No methods yet advanced and advocated could be of universal adaptability, for the one simple reason, if no other, that they have highly-technical features of manipulation that could not commonly be commanded. ”

“ To those who have the protean faculty of adaptability, the novelty of such change may even be a source of pleasure; but to those who happen to be hardened to the ruts in which they were created, the pressure of the altered environment is unbearable, and they chafe in body and in spirit under the new restrictions which they do not understand. ”

“ My dear Meldola,—As we had no time to "discourse" on Thursday, I will say a few words on the individual adaptability question. We have to deal with facts, and facts certainly show that, in many groups, there is a great amount of adaptable change produced in the individual by external conditions, and that that change is not inherited. I do not see that this places Natural Selection in any subordinate position, because this individual adaptability is evidently advantageous to many species, and may itself have been produced or increased by Natural Selection. ”

“ To do it there was need of a species that had at least these two qualities: some quenchless desire, to urge them on and on; and also adaptability of a thousand kinds to their environment.
The rhinoceros cares little for adaptability. He slogs through the world. But we! we are experts. Adaptability is what we depend on. We talk of our mastery of nature, which sounds very grand; but the fact is we respectfully adapt ourselves first, to her ways. "We attain no power over nature till we learn natural laws, and our lordship depends on the adroitness with which we learn and conform." ”

“ Thus, to the Darwinian argument that organs can be and are, demonstrably, formed by gradual adaptation to surrounding conditions without assuming the necessity of purposeful design, it is often replied that the very fact of adaptability is itself one of the strongest evidences if not of design at least of purpose. ”

“ In other words, adaptability is a fundamental character of life. Hence the fact that multicellular organisms which cannot, as a whole, fuse with others, adapt themselves to these conditions by the allotment of special cells for that purpose; while, again, the production of multicellular organisms is itself an adaptation to Nature’s need for the higher organization of life. ”

“ What we have chiefly to acquire at present is the art of adaptability. When we are able to settle down into strange billets in half an hour, and pack up, ready for departure, within the same period, we shall have made a great stride in efficiency, and added enormously to our own personal comfort. ”

“ When we want a gimlet, or a saw, or a coat-hanger we want that one thing and want it as good as it can be made. We marvel at your adaptability, but we are too thorough to be adaptable, and we do not need to be. ”

“ Second, as to organized existence, recent researches go to prove that there is in all animals a measure of adaptability to surrounding conditions of life, providing for "adaptive changes" in the organism, which become fixed, and are transmitted to succeeding generations of the same order under the law of heredity. ”

“ The human organism shows signs of breaking down under the strain of an increasingly complex civilisation. There may be a limit to our power of adaptability, and in that case humanity will have to decide whether it will alter its present mode of living or find instead some means of supplementing the normal functions of the body. ”

“ A society which is mobile, which is full of channels for the distribution of a change occurring anywhere, must see to it that its members are educated to personal initiative and adaptability. Otherwise, they will be overwhelmed by the changes in which they are caught and whose significance or connections they do not perceive. ”

“ The outcome of the theory in practice was shown to be an undue emphasis upon the training of narrow specialized modes of skill at the expense of initiative, inventiveness, and readaptability—qualities which depend upon the broad and consecutive interaction of specific activities with one another. 1 As matter of fact, the interconnection is so great, there are so many paths of construction, that every stimulus brings about some change in all of the organs of response. ”

“ Adaptive Modification.—This is a plastic principle which tends in the course of life to an increasing fitness of the bodies of individuals to their special environments and habits, well illustrated among men in the influence of various trades and occupations and operating both in active and in passive structures. Consistent with the adaptive modification principle is the fact that every individual requires habit and environment to model it into its parental form; and in every change of environment or habit every individual is carried an infinitesimal degree beyond the parental form ”

“ As a second example consider adaptation to the environment. Adapt (from Webster) means: “to change (oneself) so that one’s behavior, attitudes, etc., will conform to new or changed circumstances. Adaptation in biology means a change in structure, function or form that produces better adjustment to the environment.” These statements suggest a simulation because adjustment to the environment implies survival by exposing the organism to the beneficial rather than the inimical effects of the environment. ”

“ From the laws of adaptive modification in societies, we may therefore hope to get a clue to the laws of adaptive modification in organisms. Let us suppose, then, that a society has arrived at a state of equilibrium analogous to that of a mature animal—a state not like our own, in which growth and structural development are rapidly going on, but a state of settled balance among the functional powers of the various classes and industrial bodies, and a consequent fixity in the relative sizes of such classes and bodies. ”

“ What the environment is depends upon the nature and faculties of the individual, the same environment being a different one for amœba and human being, for the blind man and the man possessing sight; and what environment is and what the individual does are settled at one and the same time, the process of selection being one from both sides, and the variation of both. The adaptation "wherever it exists and so far as it exists" is, hence, perfect adaptation; if the lower organism is adapted to its environment, its adaptation is as perfect as that of the higher organism to its environment. ”

“ We have to consider not only the changes in an organism in the direction of more or less perfect adaptation to its environment, but also changes in the environment. These changes are in the direction of increased simplicity or of increased complexity. So [183] that we may say that the modification of life is in the direction of more or of less complete adaptation to simpler or to more complex conditions. Where the adaptation advances to more complex conditions, we speak of elaboration; where it retrogrades to less complex conditions, we speak of degeneration ”

“ And this, in turn, may be regarded as but a manifestation of the process of survival by lability rather than by stability. Everywhere the organism that exhibits the qualities of quick response, of extreme sensibility to stimuli, of capacity to change, is the individual that survives, "conquers," "advances." The quality most useful in nature, from the point of view of the domination of a wider environment, is the quality of changeableness, plasticity, mobility, or versatility. Man's particular means of adaptation to his environment is this quality of versatility. ”

“ It is the harmonising of the volitional actions with the laws of natural change. We have seen that the process of life is the continuous adaptation of organism to environment. But this is a natural, non-volitional process. Change in the environment produces change of organism to correspond with it. When cognitions are developed the [Pg 103] sequences of action are foreseen, the changes of environment are foreseen, the developments of organism are foreseen; a generalisation is made of all the factors, and logical conclusions drawn as to the necessary adaptations. ”

“ The law of adaptation by which conditions affect an organism is simple and well known. It is that which callouses the palm of the oarsman, strengthens the waist of the wrestler, fits the back to its burden. It inexorably compels the organism to adapt itself to its conditions, to like them, and so to survive them. ”

“ Adaptation, accordingly, is the consequence of all those material variations which are produced in the change of substance of the organism by the external conditions of existence, or by the influences of the surrounding external world.
How very much every organism is dependent upon the whole of its external surroundings, and changed by their alteration, is, in a general way, well known to every one. Only think how much the human power of action is dependent upon the temperature of the air, or how much the disposition of our minds depends upon the colour of the sky. ”

“ Thus we see that, in virtue of the general laws set forth in the "First Principles," an adaptive change must quickly find a term beyond which it cannot progress save slowly—a fact which explains the apparent fixity of species, or the inconsiderableness of such deviations from a type as can occur during the periods over which our observations extend. It is plain that a modifying cause, the action of which persists only for a short time, can produce only a transient modification ”

“ Representative elements, being free, can enter into different modes of combinations, and thus form adjustments and adaptations with an ease of which the primary and secondary sensory elements of the lower moments do not admit. This freedom of movement in the formation of new representative combinations is an important factor in organic life, as it gives the organism that possesses this variation an ad- vantage in the struggle for existence. Adaptation can be made for the future from the experiences of the past. ”

“ And this is the interpretation of the process which we call adaptation. Finally, each organism illustrates the law in the ensemble of its life. At the outset it daily absorbs under the form of food, an amount of force greater than it daily expends; and the surplus is daily equilibrated by growth. As maturity is approached, this surplus diminishes; and in the perfect organism, the day’s absorption of potential motion balances the day’s expenditure of actual motion. That is to say, during adult life, there is continuously exhibited an equilibration of the third order. ”

“ The other end which seems to be suggested by the theory of evolution takes account of this tendency to variation, and may be said to correspond to the notion of self-development; but this end it is harder to define. Adaptation we can easily understand by a reference to the environment to which life is to be adapted. This involves a knowledge of the conditions of the environment, but nothing more. Development can be measured by no such standard. On the one hand it implies an independent, or relatively independent, tendency to variation. ”

“ But in so slow-breeding a species as man, and with changes in the conditions of life going forward at a visibly rapid pace, the chance of36 an adequate adaptation of hybrid human nature to new conditions seems doubtful at the best. It is also to be noted that the vague character of many of the human instincts, and their consequent pliability under habituation, affords an appreciable margin of adaptation within which human nature may adjust itself to new conditions of life. ”

“ There is another aspect of the Adaptation problem to which I can only allude very briefly. May not our present ideas of the universality and precision of Adaptation be greatly exaggerated? The fit of organism to its environment is not after all so very close—a proposition unwelcome perhaps, but one which could be illustrated by very copious evidence. Natural Selection is stern, but she has her tolerant moods. ”

“ One of the prime requisites for evolution is a certain power for adaptation to varying circumstances, that is to say, of plasticity, bodily and mental. But the power of adaptation is mainly dependent on the power of thinking certain new things sufficiently like certain others to which we have been accustomed for us not to be too much incommoded by the change—upon the power, in fact, of mistaking the new for the old. ”

“ Or variation may occur through the establishment of new relations between the species inhabiting some locality while inanimate nature remains uniform, or through migration into new inanimate or animate surroundings. Variations, in short, may arise under the influence of any change in the general environment which renders necessary adaptive changes in structure. But this adaptation in some cases takes place in the mind, new actions or methods of meeting the contingency being adopted which render physical changes unnecessary. ”

“ It is, literally speaking, infinitely improbable that the organs of adaptation we see in a forest, in plant and animal, should have come into existence through chance alone.
The organs of adaptation are distinctly and definitely purposive structures—not purposed, perhaps, but certainly purposeful. In its struggle with its surroundings and with competitors the individual has been compelled to bring into being organs to fulfil a purpose. ”