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v One of the difficulties inherent in my aim was to find a method of exposition which would be as intelligible to the biologist who is no mathematician as to the mathematician who is no biologist, or to the philosopher who is neither... The method finally adopted is a compromise in which the bare minimum is explained to enable the uninitiated to follow at least the essential steps in the argument.
p.38-39 Speaking generally, it may be said that the notion of adaptation when applied to living nature refers to the widespread and striking appropriateness which organic activities show in relation to the needs of the organism, and to the effectiveness with which the organism meets the demands made upon them by their environment. For our present analytical purposes it will be expedient to take the idea of appropriate response as a starting point and to begin by exposing some of the spatio-temporal relationships and patterns of causal connexions which it implies.
p.39-40 If we think of an organic response as a single, complex, physical event, the idea of appropriate response points beyond this complex event in three important respects.
In the first place, the response must be to something, it must be evoked or called into being by some antecedent environmental state... Secondly, the response can be called 'appropriate' only in relation to the subsequent occurrence of some event... this future event... consists of the subsequent survival... or, at any rate, consists of the occurrence of some condition or event assumed to contribute to the probability of that survival... In the third place... depends on the environmental circumstances which it meets and with which it comes to interact
p.44-45 if we say that under given circumstances a certain line of fire is 'appropriate' we envisage not only the given course of the target but at the same time compare it before the mind's eye with an extended range of possible alternative courses which the target might have taken and for each of which there exists one, and usually only one, effective line of fire. Each of these respective lines of fire is called the 'appropriate' one in relation to the corresponding path of the target.
p.45 According to the above analysis an appropriate response is an effective response which is conceived against the background of an ensemble of alternative sets of environmental circumstances and as a member of a correlated ensemble of effective responses.
p.49 at the time of making this appropriate response to the movement of the target, the gun-training mechanism was objectively so conditioned that there existed a definite range of possible variations of the target's path such that, whatever other course the target might have taken... the mechanism would have responded by an appropriate modification of the gun's line of fire... the gun's line of fire was appropriate... this appropriateness was secured by objective system-properties of the gun-training mechanism which would also have caused any one of an extended range of alternate paths to have been matched by an appropriate line of fire.
p.53-54 a fundamental biological function of the eyes, and for that matter of all sense organs, is precisely to establish causal connexions which will enable environmental variables to become the coenetic variables of adapted organic behaviour.
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