Measuring Adaptive Behavior
An organism’s behavioral strategies and ability to adapt will determine how they respond under different environmental conditions. Fitness is a common measure of adaptive success, and can be defined as the number of descendants left over after a group exhibits a particular behavioral strategy. Successful strategies will result in increased survival and reproduction, which in turn can be characterized as a profitable behavioral adaption.
Read more about this topic: Adaptive Behavior (ecology)
Famous quotes containing the words measuring, adaptive and/or behavior:
“We recognize caste in dogs because we rank ourselves by the familiar dog system, a ladderlike social arrangement wherein one individual outranks all others, the next outranks all but the first, and so on down the hierarchy. But the cat system is more like a wheel, with a high-ranking cat at the hub and the others arranged around the rim, all reluctantly acknowledging the superiority of the despot but not necessarily measuring themselves against one another.”
—Elizabeth Marshall Thomas. Strong and Sensitive Cats, Atlantic Monthly (July 1994)
“The shift from the perception of the child as innocent to the perception of the child as competent has greatly increased the demands on contemporary children for maturity, for participating in competitive sports, for early academic achievement, and for protecting themselves against adults who might do them harm. While children might be able to cope with any one of those demands taken singly, taken together they often exceed childrens adaptive capacity.”
—David Elkind (20th century)
“Excessive attention, even if its negative, is such a powerful reward to a child that it actually reinforces the undesirable behavior. You need to learn restraint, to respond to far fewer situations, to ask yourself questions like, Is this really important? Could I let this behavior go? What would happen if I just wait? Could I lose by doing nothing?”
—Stanley Turecki (20th century)