Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Adaptationism is an approach to studying the evolution of form and function. It attempts to frame the existence and persistence of traits, assuming that each of them arose independently and improved the reproductive success of the organism's ancestors.
Sociobiology is a field of biology that aims to explain social behavior in terms of evolution.It draws from disciplines including psychology, ethology, anthropology, evolution, zoology, archaeology, and population genetics.
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 they suggest a deity's intentions, but others note that adaptation is necessarily purposeful.
An adaptive system is a set of interacting or interdependent entities, real or abstract, forming an integrated whole that together are able to respond to environmental changes or changes in the interacting parts, in a way analogous to either continuous physiological homeostasis or evolutionary adaptation in biology.
Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975; 25th anniversary edition 2000) is a book by the biologist E. O. Wilson.It helped start the sociobiology debate, one of the great scientific controversies in biology of the 20th century and part of the wider debate about evolutionary psychology and the modern synthesis of evolutionary biology.
It is adaptive in that the individual and collective behavior mutate and self-organize corresponding to the change-initiating micro-event or collection of events. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] [ 3 ] It is a "complex macroscopic collection" of relatively "similar and partially connected micro-structures" formed in order to adapt to the changing environment and ...
Adaptive capacity confers resilience to perturbation, giving ecological and human social systems the ability to reconfigure themselves with minimum loss of function.In ecological systems, this resilience shows as net primary productivity and maintenance of biomass and biodiversity, and the stability of hydrological cycles.
This behavioral adaptation coincides with the chimpanzee's ability to distinguish kin from non-kin (referred to as visual kin selection) allowing chimps to formulate large, complex societies, where they use altruistic methods to ensure their genes persist in future generations. [7]