Adaptation, acclimation, addiction, remedy, etc.

This piece seeks to reflect upon the nature of adaptation and our usage of it with relation to design, addiction, and final cause.

This previously unpublished document was found amongst the manuscript papers for Mind and Nature in the Bateson Archives at the University of Santa Cruz Library Special Collections.

It appears that “adaptation” was a concept generated by lineal thinking and that as we move forward into a world of causal circuits, i.e. of mental process as that notion is here defined, we discover that “adaptation” is only another face of addiction.

It reflects on the issue of adaptation from a very different angle than in the usual scientific discourse.