but no one is disputing that adaptive features are the result of natural selection.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong but isn't this exactly what Prof. M
is disputing? Adaptationists insist there is a fitness value to all adaptations in your body or they wouldn't be there. This leads most adaptationists to posit selective pressures (natural selection) on the most flimsy of bases.
What Prof. M is saying, by my reading, is that having or not having a nose may be a major adaptation which helps define a species and is a major selective determinant in passing through the sieve of natural selection (fitness), but the (beautiful) angle of the bridge of his nose has little to no selective value to fitness and this adaptation merely drifts through the future population as a function of the probabilities in meiosis and fecundity.
Not all adaptations are the result of natural selection. The majority of the cosmetic features we see in a human phenome are adaptions born of mutation, have little to no selective value for fitness and increase or decrease their presence in a population by drift alone, not natural selection.
Edited by AZPaul3, : cuz
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