What is an adaptive landscape?

An adaptive landscape is a very simple – but powerful – way of visualizing the evolution of life in terms of the geometry of spatial relationships, namely the spatial relationships one finds in a landscape. Consider an imaginary landscape in which you see mountains of high elevation in one region, towering mountains separated by deep valleys with precipitous slopes. In another region these mountains give way to lower elevation rolling hills separated by wide, gently sloping valleys, and that these further give way to broad flat plains in the distance. Now replace the concept of ‘elevation’ (height above sea level) with ‘degree of adaptation’ and you have an adaptive landscape. Why is that such a powerful concept? The purpose of this book is to answer that question.

The concept of the adaptive landscape was first proposed by the geneticist Sewall Wright in 1932. Being a geneticist, he thought in terms of genes rather than morphology and Darwinian fitness rather than adaptation, and his original concept is what is termed a fitness landscape today, rather than an adaptive landscape.