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Adaptation

Adaptation is living configurability Adaptation is what living things do to survive their environment. It does not depend on mutations. It uses a complex system of genetic manipulation built into all living things.

Adaptation is not Evolution

Several years ago scientists thought that random mutations caused living things like bacteria to "evolve" in order to adapt to their environment (survive antibiotics)

When physicists were shown by molecular biologists the behavior of groups of bacteria as their environment was stressed, they understood that the bacteria were not mutating but performing a repeatable network calculation. In other words, stressing two bacterial cultures in exactly the same way produces exactly the same "mutation"? This is not what I was taught in school.

Meanwhile We Configure

When we make things configurable they are suitable for a wider range of uses. Configurability makes things adaptable. Making things configurable is harder than making them not configurable. Some people think that designing configurability in is "overkill" or wasted design.

Back on the Bacteria Ranch

Now we know that the bacteria have a mechanism built within them that allows groups of them to respond to their environment in a way that individual bacteria do not. This is referred to as emergent behavior or the sum of the whole is greater than the parts. Just how do we account for this apparent evolutionary overkill mechanism? It all just happened.

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