The essentials of defining adaptation

The concept of adaptation has a considerable importance in many areas of research. Evolution theory is all about long-term adaptation, psychology is (among other things) interested in how people cope mentally with various changes in their life, business research tries to find ways to make companies survive and flourish in the ever more turbulent markets, armies rethink their strategies and become more flexible to be able to counter new threats, engineering disciplines move towards making systems better at reconfiguring and repairing themselves without costly and time-consuming human intervention, achieving sophisticated artificial life and artificial intelligence is in large part about finding out how to create systems that are highly adaptive and cope with the difficult and often unexpected situations they encounter, and so forth. When trying to understand, manage or create large complex systems, the issue of adaptivity almost always arises to the set of top concerns, even so much so that it has become quite common to use the term Complex Adaptive Systems when referring to the subject of research, management and design efforts in various fields that deal with systems consisting of large numbers of interacting components.