Adaptation
“The world doesn’t change in front of your eyes, it changes behind your back.” ~ English author Terry Hayes
Evolutionary biologists aim to answer a single question: how has the great diversity of life been productively generated?
The apparent increase in adaptive complexity of organisms over the history of life is one of the great mysteries of biology. ~ American evolutionary biologist Daniel McShea
While there are many common fallacies, there is no mystery. One common fiction is that randomness plays a part in evolution. Another is that evolution proceeds without objective.
Nothing in Nature is random. A provocation may be obscure, but it is there. Saltation and adaptation dispel the prospect that randomness is involved in evolution.
Many evolutionary biologists favor the idea of randomness because the implications of the alternative frighten them into befuddlement. Acts of Nature as intentional is termed teleology. Evolutionary biologists cringe from this concept because it puts natural causes outside the observable realm, and thereby makes the beating heart of Nature unscientific in their empirically minded minds.
Biological evolution obviously exhibits intent: survival and reproducibility. The entire history of life is a dramatic presentation of organisms’ will to survive and propagate. That calamities may render adaptation awry only makes the show a spectacular melodrama.
No sane evolutionary biologist denies survival and perpetuation as driving forces. The objection is only the obvious ramification, thereby creating a silly paradox of denial in refusing to ascribe any impetus behind evolution.
