Chapter 1 identifies three approaches to and perspectives on adaptation: as process, as product, and as reception. At different times in the long history of adaptation practices, these dimensions have been associated, at different times, with prominent models found in science and biology, literature and writing, commerce and art, technology and theories of representation. Through the course of this history, different models of adaptation have in turn mobilized and defined adaptation in relation to three primary motifs and formulas: adaptation as an evolutionary process, as a product whose relation to a source is based in fidelity or infidelity, and as intertextual relations engaged through reception.