# Fitness Landscape > **Machine-Evolution Nexus:** [[articles/Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution|Digital Darwinism and the Invisible World of Machine Evolution]] places this concept within the history and governance of substrate-independent evolution. **Domain:** Evolution / Optimization **Doc Type:** Canonical Wiki Node **Maturity:** Developed ## Definition A fitness landscape maps variants or genotypes to reproductive success within a specified environment, often pictured as peaks, valleys and neutral networks. ## Machine-Evolution Context Avida’s “survival of the flattest” shows that a lower local peak can defeat a fragile high peak when neighboring mutations remain viable. Landscapes also change when organisms alter one another’s environment. ## Continuity and Evidence Boundary Fitness is contextual and reproductive, not moral worth or universal superiority. Engineered objectives are simplified landscapes whose omissions can govern harmful behavior. ## Relationships [[wiki/Survival of the Flattest|Survival of the Flattest]], [[wiki/Mutational Robustness|Mutational Robustness]], [[wiki/Objective Function|Objective Function]], [[wiki/Niche Construction|Niche Construction]] ## Sources / Provenance - Sewall Wright’s adaptive-landscape work; Wilke et al., _Nature_ 412 (2001).