Towards a better understanding of adaptation: Problem description, partial solutions, and recommendations

Pim Edelaar , Niels J Dingemanse, Samantha C. Patrick, Denis Réale, Alastair J. Wilson, Amélie Baud, Daniel Bolnick, Dries Bonte, Raul Costa Pereira, Troy Day, Laurel Fogarty, Willem Frankenhuis, Mauricio Gonzalez-Forero, Marie I. Kaiser , Julien G. A. Martin, Jason Matthiopoulos, Klaus Reinhold, Holger Schielzeth, Meike J. Wittmann, Jonathan Wright, Melanie Dammhahn

This paper is the product of an international workshop aiming to make progress in our general understanding of adaptation. We met from 5-7 February 2025 in Hannover (Germany), funded by the foundation “Volkswagen Stiftung”. For our group of theoretical and empirical biologists, social scientists, and philosophers of science we set up a program to facilitate communication and collaboration between people with diverse backgrounds and viewpoints. The overall goal that the scientific community should strive for, we think, should be to obtain concrete conceptual, analytical, and experimental tools for researchers to understand and study all the processes of adaptation, and thereby the global phenomenon of adaptation. Our workshop aimed to contribute to this overall goal. For this, we discussed the relative strengths and weaknesses of different approaches, identified areas of consensus, identified areas of disagreement, and resolved (sub)areas of disagreement. Here we briefly report on the progress we have made during the workshop. We lay out the problem, discuss terminology, present a visual framework to think about adaptation, suggest useful approaches for its study, and provide recommendations for practitioners and policymakers.