Literature and Language

Running head: Literature and Language
Institution:
Name:
Tutor:
Course:
Date of submission
LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
Introduction
According to the context, adaptation is defined as a phenotypic variant with the highest reproductive success in a given environment, among a set of variants that is well specified Adaptation can be defined as features that enable an organism to survive and reproduce better in the environment it lives. Adaptation is the good fit of organisms in the environment they live. With different causes, it can occur at three levels of the hierarchy (Gould, 1979).Adaptation according to physiologists can also be termed as the phenotypic plasticity which allows organisms to mould their form during ontogeny, to prevailing circumstances. While human adaptations to high attitude are classified in this category, resistance to sick ling heterozygote to malaria, are considered genetic and Darwinian.
Strengths and limitations of the adaptive process include; it only refers mostly to the features and not to the genotypes of the specific loci. This is owed to the fact that a variety of genotypes can produce any given phenotype. Furthermore, it is only defining the explicit alternatives because the exact phenotype under question determines the flexibility of the choice of the set of alternatives. The above adaptation does not require the demonstration of a mechanism of evolutionary change or a specific historical process (Gould, 1979).
Alternatives for the adaptation explanation include fitness, set of phenotypes and environmental context.
Fitness is mostly measured through the success of reproduction. This can either be done over a reproductive episode or over a long period of time. As you are doing this, put into consideration the effects of a certain trait to an individual’s genetic relatives. Other than progeny, grand progeny can also be counted (Gould, 1979). In answering different questions of reproductive success, measurement can be done using both short and long term. For effective short term measures of reproductive success, a good relation with the long time measures must be positively maintained. A genotype with greater fitness is one that increases in frequency in the next generation when compared to other genotypes in the same population all factors being equal. Most of the time, it is much easier to isolate the effects of variations brought about by phenotypes on different fitness components in the short term since interactions between multiple attributes of phenotypes and fitness components determine lifetime reproductive success (Gould, 1979). To determine whether hypothesized short term components are major contributors of lifetime reproductive success, an examination can be done to particular selective hypothesis.
Phenotypes can be compared according to the degree of fitness. They can either be discrete or continuous or can be conditional or invariant. Either way, they should be specific. The phenotype set can include all the natural occurring variants. Even with no phenotypic variation in a trait, experiments or theoretical models or both can be used to make a conclusion of whether it is an adaptation (Gould, 1979). In a population, some individuals have phenotypic characteristics that make survival and successful reproduction more enhanced than others. Some even go to the extent of tracing success variation back from genetic variants. This enhances a change in the population’s lineage through the genetic characteristics. Methods of measuring selection in natural populations, including quantitative genetics theory and utility of regression methods, do not necessarily tell anything about adaptation b...