A reader posted the following response to an earlier discussion of mine [click here]. He said, "We can't turn back time, we need to adapt." But adaptation is many things. Sometimes when we adapt it's good for us - biologically and psychologically. And sometimes it's bad for us. I'd like to discuss different types of adaptation. This discussion forms part of the argument for smaller cities, fewer people, and bigger nature.
One of the most common ways of understanding adaptation is in terms of genetic change through the process of natural selection. The basic idea here is that genes that lead to behaviors that enhance survival tend to reproduce themselves more rather than less. In turn, those genes and correlative behaviors grow more frequent in a population. But there are other ways to understand the idea of adaptation, including homeostasis, acclimatization, addiction, habituation, equilibration, assimilation, and accommodation. Here goes....
Homeostasis is a type of adaptation wherein an organism seeks a stable "normal" state, while being able to handle some minor variation. Our bodies, for example, seek to regulate their internal temperatures to one that is normal (e.g., about 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit). Sometimes a body is hotter, especially when it's fighting a disease with a fever. Other times the body's temperature might drop a little lower. But sooner usually than later the temperature comes back to normal.
Addiction is also a type of an adaptation. Webster's dictionary defines addiction as "a compulsive physiological need for a habit-forming drug (as heroin)." But what counts as a drug? We would all agree about heroin. How about tobacco? Caffeine? Are people addicted to Ibuprofen if they use it daily to manage low level pain in their body? Does it makes sense to say that some people are addicted to chocolate? To Big Macs? To soda? It's not a straightforward construct. But, still, we understand it in its strong form, as in an addiction to heroin. And we know that this form of adaptation can harm us.
The same thing happens with the term habituation. We become habituated to sitting through Sunday morning church or long Passover Seders, to army life, to bad traffic, to an abusive relationship, to sunny days if we live in Phoenix and rainy days if we live in Seattle, and to the fast flow of information over the internet. Psychologically, it's also possible to become habituated or acclimated to difficult events outside a normal range of experience. For example, think of an individual that progresses through a life-extracting disease, like AIDS. Over months and often a handful of years, the individual succumbs to increasingly awful physical states, and at each of those degraded physical states, the mind needs to adapt in the sense of readjust.
Adaptation takes on a different meaning when applied to a child's cognitive development. According to Jean Piaget, a child brings to new situations an existing way of understanding them, and in this sense seeks to assimilate the new to the old. But that process never works completely, so the child also needs to accommodate to the new. Sometimes the accommodations are not successful. At that junction, the child is disequilibrated, recognizing the problem but not the solution. Thus, toward seeking equilibration, and through interaction, the child reorganizes existing structures of knowledge to take account of the new and previously discrepant information. Notice, then, that in this account of the equilibration of cognitive structures the psychological system does not seek homeostasis in terms of an original state (as occurs with the body's homeostasis around its normal internal temperature) but in terms of new and more comprehensive and adequate psychological structures.
Here's my larger point. We have choices about the world we create. Our choices should take into account how we do and will adapt to that world. But adaptation is not singular. It involves many different processes and mechanisms, including those that involve genetic change, homeostasis, acclimatization, addiction, habituation, equilibration, assimilation, and accommodation. If someone wants to say - and it gets said too often - "don't worry, we'll adapt, we'll be fine," then they need to show that across these different types of adaptation we really will be fine.
Given big cities, more people, and little nature, I don't think we will be fine. In future posts, I'll say more about why.
