I thank you all indeed for these excellent ideas and references. It's just what I was looking for, and I can see it could keep me busy for a long time.

One of the difficulties (and so one of the greatest delights) when jumping from a familiar field into an unfamiliar one is learning to line up your old vocabulary and conceptual world with the vocabulary and conceptual world of the new territory -- like being dropped onto the far side of a mountain range that you know, but one that you have to study for a while to figure out where you now are in relation to where you were before.

"Adaptation" as a keyword in evolutionary biology has been subject to technical debate for generations. It can refer to a state-of-being (fitted to one's environment) as well as to a process of change (the process of becoming fitted to one's environment). As an historical aside: "adaptation" as a state-of-being had been observed by naturalists from time immemorial, and the apparent fit of organisms to their environments was classically seen as evidence for a Designer (God) who created the fit, since it couldn't possibly have arisen by chance. (In philosophy this is called "the argument [for the existence of God] from design"). The historical reason that Darwin's Origin of Species was so important was that it provided a third alternative: "adaptation" was understood to be the result neither of (a) chance, nor (b) design, but (c) natural selection, the process that adapts populations of organisms to their environments over generational time.

So, coming back to our comparative disciplinary context, I guess there are two items I may want to explore further. First is the essential local-ness of adaptation. This is a basic idea from evolutionary biology: natural selection doesn't result in adaptation-in-general, but rather in adaptation to the immediate conditions right where you are. Whether a change is adaptive depends entirely on the local environment, and something that is adaptive at one moment may not be at the next if the environment changes out from under you.

A second item I may explore further concerns that conditions that promote adaptation. Darwin described a variety of general characteristics of populations that permit selection to work more effectively and rapidly. These can be extended to various other non-biological learning/adapting processes, and this I think might be a useful exercise. The practical bottom line would be something like, "Advice from Darwin: Ten ways to make your organization more adaptive."

Thanks again for all the excellent references.

Bob