Adaptation Definition: Fitting In, Surviving, Retelling

Senses of the word

1. Adjusting to change. The general sense: how a person, group or thing gets used to new circumstances. Her adaptation to night shifts took about a month.
2. A trait in living things. In biology, a feature passed down through generations that helps an organism survive and reproduce in its environment.
3. A new version of a work. A book, play or true story reshaped for another form, such as a film, a series, a comic or a radio drama.
4. A change in response to a changing climate. In environmental policy, steps that help communities live with the effects of a warming world, such as flood barriers or heat-tolerant crops.
5. Senses adjusting. In psychology, sensory adaptation is when your senses become less responsive to a steady signal, like no longer noticing a ticking clock.

The adaptation definition in biology

For scientists, an adaptation is an inherited characteristic that has become common in a population because it helped ancestors survive and have offspring. It develops over many generations through natural selection, not within one animal's lifetime. Biologists usually sort adaptations into three groups.

A cactus is a good plant example: its spines are modified leaves that lose less water and deter animals, and its thick stem stores water. Such traits fit the organism to its ecosystem, and the variety of traits across species feeds into biodiversity. Some traits help keep the body's inner balance, a topic covered on our homeostasis page.

Examples in sentences

• Switching from a village school to a crowded city one required a real adaptation for the twins.
• The polar bear's thick fur and layer of fat are adaptations to extreme cold.
• The theatre company's adaptation of the classic novel cut two hours down to ninety minutes.
• Coastal towns are spending on adaptation, raising sea walls and planting mangroves.
• Our eyes need several minutes of adaptation before we can see stars clearly in a dark field.

Adaptation, acclimatization and evolution

• Adaptation in biology is a trait shaped over generations. In daily speech it is any adjustment.
• Acclimatization is a short-term change in one individual, such as breathing more easily after a week at high altitude.
• Evolution is the wider process of change in living things over many generations. Adaptations are one outcome of it.
• Mitigation, in climate talk, means reducing the causes of warming, while adaptation means coping with its effects. The two words are often paired in policy reports.

A person who adapts easily is adaptable, a quality close to resilience.

Origin and history

Adaptation reached English around 1600 from French, which took it from Late Latin adaptatio. The verb behind it, adaptare, joins ad-, to, and aptare, to fit or join, and is related to apt. Early English uses were about fitting one thing to another. The sense of modifying something to suit new conditions is recorded from 1790, and the biological sense of variations that suit a living thing to changed conditions was in use by 1859, as writing on natural selection spread.

Word forms and common errors

The verb is adapt: adapt to a change, adapt something for a purpose, adapted from a source. Useful adjectives are adaptive (helping adaptation, as in an adaptive trait) and adaptable (able to adapt).

• Adapt or adopt? To adapt is to change to fit. To adopt is to take something on as your own, such as a plan, a pet or a child. We adopted the plan and then adapted it for our town.
• Adaptation or adaption? Adaption is a recorded variant, but adaptation is the standard form in schools and science.
• Count or not? Adaptation can be uncountable for the process and countable for a single trait or version: two adaptations of the same book.

Our science vocabulary hub gathers related terms from biology, physics and chemistry.