Strict adherence to a despite variation in or ongoing conditions.

Canalization is a description of the accuracy or precision of outcomes in the face of , , or environmental variability. It is a triumph of determinism in spite of stochasticity.

Canalization can also be viewed as a consequence of adaptations that have the effect of resisting degradation in the usefulness of adaptations in the latter's . After all, the potential to display, for example, or , for example, is only as useful to the extent that an organism succeeds in possessing claws or wings.

Canalization is related to the idea of , that is, the potential to display a given trait given possession of underlying alleles.