Human Adaptation

Human adaptation refers to the biological, cultural, and social processes through which people adjust to their environments and to changing conditions, ensuring survival, reproduction, and wellbeing. Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection explained biological adaptation, while Herbert Spencer applied adaptation to society, inspiring social Darwinism, which later scholars rejected. Anthropologists emphasized culture as humanity's primary means of adaptation. Julian Steward's cultural ecology examined how societies adapt to specific environments through technology and subsistence strategies, and Marvin Harris and Roy Rappaport developed materialist and ecological accounts of cultural practices. Talcott Parsons identified adaptation as one of four functional requirements of any social system, and Gerhard Lenski's ecological-evolutionary theory linked social development to technology and environment. Robert Merton's modes of adaptation described how individuals respond to strain between goals and means. Contemporary work on climate adaptation, by Neil Adger and others, stresses that capacity varies with wealth, institutions, and power. Critics caution against treating all cultural practices as functional. Human adaptation remains central to research on culture, environment, resilience, health, and social change.