Intended mutations

To all my scientific colleagues: please forgive the gross oversimplifications contained in the following post. IOW, I know this doesn’t cover the details, so bugger off. Hi Mike,Interesting thread. Others are addressing different aspects of your OP, but I’d like to single out this paragraph as a launching point for perhaps another way of looking at the question. One of the problems I see with the line of argument you are advancing in this paragraph is that you are looking at an end product, and speculating that the end product is what was intended all along. The difficulty with this conception is that all the organisms we see today, with all their wondrous variety and myriad fascinating adaptations, are not adapted to the environments they inhabit today - they are adapted to the environments in which their ancestors lived. The genetic makeup of populations today - including morphology and genotype with all the latter’s mutations - reflects the selection pressures that operated on their forefathers. Selection pressures operating on populations today - including on those mutations that arise today in a given population - will be reflected only in the phenotype/genotype of future generations. IF mutations become fixed in a population - perhaps increasing the member organisms’ relative fitness - changes in selection pressures in the future may actually reduce the fitness of a given population or even cause extinction, because they are adapted to the past, not the future.So how do we know this? One item of evidence is the existence today of ecological widows and orphans, especially striking among some plant lineages. For a very long time the existence of flowers that were wrongly-shaped for any existing pollinators, fruits and seeds that were either too large, too small or too toxic for any existing dispersers, extremely patchy distributions, and/or mechanical defenses that seemed to serve no useful function were a constant puzzle for ecologists. Scientists came up with a plethora of hypotheses to explain the observations, like “phylogenetic inertia” (which basically asserts a “time lag” in adaptive response to changing ecological conditions based on some kind of “in-born resistance” to change). None of these explanations were very satisfying. Enter Paul Martin (yeah, the same guy who “invented” the Pleistocene Overkill hypothesis) and Dan Janzen and the “Anachronism Hypothesis”. (see Janzen DH, Martin PS, 1982, Neotropical Anachronisms: The Fruit the Gompotheres Ate, Science 215:19-27). In a nutshell, this theory states that the maladaptive fruits etc represent adaptations for an environment that no longer pertains. Well worth the read, whether you agree with the article or not (and many ecologists, myself included, find aspects of the idea as originally presented is missing some bits). In other words, the idea that mutations are directed toward variations that serve some “future” function is falsified by the lack of such “goal-oriented” adaptations in multiple species from guanacaste (Enterolobium cyclocarpum - Janzen’s “flagship” species in his article) to jicaro (Crescentia alata) to honey locust ( Gleditsia triacanthos) in North America and a myriad of others.Conclusion: IF the idea that future-related mutations exist is correct, why do these species show adaptations geared toward a vanished past, rather than a forthcoming future (which in the past when these organisms evolved is equivalent to today’s present)?