Importance of adaptation for the survival of species

Adaptation is a change or the process of change by which an organism or species

becomes better suited to its environment. Adaptation differs from flexibility,
acclimatization, and learning, all of which are changes during life which are not inherited.
Flexibility deals with the relative capacity of an organism to maintain itself in different
habitats: its degree of specialization. Acclimatization describes automatic physiological
adjustments during life, learning means improvement in behavioral performance during
life.

Flexibility stems from phenotypic plasticity, the ability of an organism with a given
genotype (genetic type) to change its phenotype (observable characteristics) in response
to changes in its habitat, or to move to a different habitat. The degree of flexibility is
inherited, and varies between individuals. A highly specialized animal or plant lives only
in a well-defined habitat, eats a specific type of food, and cannot survive if its needs are
not met. Many herbivores are like this; extreme examples are koalas which depend on
Eucalyptus, and giant pandas which require bamboo. A generalist, on the other hand,
eats a range of food, and can survive in many different conditions. Examples are humans,
rats, crabs and many carnivores. The tendency to behave in a specialized or exploratory
manner is inherited—it is an adaptation. Rather different is developmental flexibility: "An
animal or plant is developmentally flexible if when it is raised in or transferred to new
conditions, it changes in structure so that it is better fitted to survive in the new
environment," writes evolutionary biologist John Maynard Smith.

If humans move to a higher altitude, respiration and physical exertion become a problem,
but after spending time in high altitude conditions they acclimatize to the reduced partial
pressure of oxygen, such as by producing more red blood cells. The ability to acclimatize
is an adaptation, but the acclimatization itself is not. The reproductive rate declines, but
deaths from some tropical diseases also go down. Over a longer period of time, some
people are better able to reproduce at high altitudes than others. They contribute more
heavily to later generations, and gradually by natural selection the whole population
becomes adapted to the new conditions. This has demonstrably occurred, as the
observed performance of long-term communities at higher altitude is significantly better
than the performance of new arrivals, even when the new arrivals have had time to
acclimatize.
Sometimes, Species or living organisms manages their kind of living in order for them to
survive. At some point, there will be changes in their current environment, so species
adjust to new environment. Species or living organism could possible die if they won’t
have updated or if they won’t react to their changing environmental conditions. Organisms
can adapt to an environment in different ways. They can adapt biologically, meaning they
alter body functions. An example of biological adaptation can be seen in the bodies of
people living at high altitudes, such as Tibet. Tibetans thrive at altitudes where oxygen
levels are up to 40 percent lower than at sea level. Breathing air that thin would cause
most people to get sick, but Tibetans’ bodies have evolved changes in their body
chemistry. Most people can survive at high altitudes for a short time because their bodies
raise their levels of hemoglobin, a protein that transports oxygen in the blood. However,
continuously high levels of hemoglobin are dangerous, so increased hemoglobin levels
are not a good solution to high-altitude survival in the long term. Tibetans seemed to have
evolved genetic mutations that allow them to use oxygen far more efficiently without the
need for extra hemoglobin. Organisms can also exhibit behavioral adaptation. One
example of behavioral adaptation is how emperor penguins in Antarctica crowd together
to share their warmth in the middle of winter.
Scientists who studied adaptation prior to the development of evolutionary theory included
Georges Louis Leclerc Comte de Buffon. He was a French mathematician who believed
that organisms changed over time by adapting to the environments of their geographical
locations. Another French thinker, Jean Baptiste Lamarck, proposed that animals could
adapt, pass on their adaptations to their offspring, and therefore evolve. The example he
gave stated the ancestors of giraffes might have adapted to a shortage of food from short
trees by stretching their necks to reach higher branches. In Lamarck’s thinking, the
offspring of a giraffe that stretched its neck would then inherit a slightly longer neck.
Lamarck theorized that behaviors aquired in a giraffe's lifetime would affect its offspring.
However, it was Darwin’s concept of natural selection, wherein favorable traits like a long
neck in giraffes suvived not because of aquired skills, but because only giraffes that had
long enough necks to feed themselves survived long enough to reproduce. Natural
selection, then, provides a more compelling mechanism for adaptation and evolution than
Lamarck's theories.
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.
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
proposed instead that it was explained by natural selection.
Adaptation is related to biological fitness, which governs the rate of evolution as
measured by change in gene frequencies. Often, two or more species co-adapt and co-
evolve as they develop adaptations that interlock with those of the other species, such as
with flowering plants and pollinating insects. In mimicry, species evolve to resemble other
species; in Müllerian mimicry this is a mutually beneficial co-evolution as each of a group
of strongly defended species (such as wasps able to sting) come to advertise their
defenses in the same way. Features evolved for one purpose may be co-opted for a
different one, as when the insulating feathers of dinosaurs were co-opted for bird flight.
Adaptation is a major topic in the philosophy of biology, as it concerns function and
purpose. Some biologists try to avoid terms which imply purpose in adaptation, not least
because it suggests a deity's intentions, but others note that adaptation is necessarily
purposeful.

Submitted by: Ezekiel Unay