PZ Myers vs. Adaptationism

Um, but no one is disputing that adaptive features are the result of natural selection. What's being refuted here is the notion that natural selection is all-important to evolution because it's responsible for adaptation. Adaptation is not synonymous with evolution.

Contemporary biologists know a lot more about population genetics than Darwin did, and realize that natural selection has been given pride of place for many reasons aside from scientific evidence.

The notion of adaptation lends itself very easily to theorizing about what a trait or feature is "for," and the allure of this boundless horizon has led to a lot of bad thinking in a self-validating Panglossian fashion. Unfortunately, this bad thinking has also taken the form of scientific rationales for prejudices about race and gender.

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.

Secondly, there's the fact that most women do not orgasm just from penetrative sex. If female orgasm came about because women who orgasm are more likely to have sex and thus reproduce, why aren't nerves rearranged so that penetration is the easiest way to orgasm. Surely this would be the way to make pleasure-seeking most likely to result in pregnancy.

And if I may venture to add that many pregnancies had little to do with the Big "O" either.