BioConcepts

adaptive valueAnpassungswert (ger.)

• The balance of genetic advantages and disadvantages that determines the ability of an individual organism (or genotype) to survive and reproduce in a given environment. The ‘fittest’ is the individual (or genotype) that produces the largest number of offspring that survive to maturity and reproduce. (Oxford Dict. of Zoology 2009)
  category selection

  1893

  Adaptations due to Natural Selection must not only have always presented some degree of adaptive value, but this must always have been sufficiently great to reach what I have called a selection-value

  Romanes, G.J. (1893). Mr. Herbert Spencer on “natural selection”. The Contemporary Review 63, 499-517: 508.

  1895

  in order that any adaptive structure or instinct should be seized upon and accumulated by natural selection, it must from the very first have had an adaptive value sufficiently great to have constituted its presence a matter of life and death in the struggle for existence

  Romanes, G.J. (1895). Darwin and After Darwin, vol. 2. Post-Darwinian Questions, Heredity and Utility: 62.

  1896

  There are […] many more or less isolated activities, with very little initial adaptive value, which resemble raw recruits. Such are the comparatively aimless and random limb-movements of the human infant, as he lies helpless on his mother’s lap.

  Lloyd Morgan, C. (1896). Animal automatism and consciousness. The Monist 7, 1-18: 13. 

  1900

  A primitive consciousness, on the other hand, may have been of survival value. It would have had to compete only with the simplest, even merely chemical, forms of reaction. Its incipient complication of modes of action would probably be of high adaptive value.

  Watkins, G.P. (1900). Psychical life in Protozoa. Amer. J. Psychol. 11, 166-180: 170. 

  1982

  adaptive value The comparative fitness q.v. of different genotypes in a given environment; the survival and reproductive value of one genotype relative to the other genotypes in the population.    

  Lincoln, R.J., Boxshall, G.A. & Clark, P.F. (1982). A Dictionary of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics: 4.