An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an organism into unitary 'traits' and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately.



S. J. GOULD AND R. C. LEWONTIN (1979) The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: a critique of the adaptationist programme







Adaptation is a feature of an anthropocentric ontology that some scientists have chosen to take for granted; it is a way of usefully understanding the changes in the ‘cell states’ without having to deal directly with them. Adaptation is an illusion created by taking an ontological shift away from absolute reality.



Kurt Richardson (2004) The Problematisation of Existence: Towards a Philosophy of Complexity







A strongly adaptationist viewpoint leads to the assumption that essentially every trait must be the product of adaptive natural selection, with a specific genetic explanation. The assumption that everything is being selected all the time at the gene level can lead us to seek functional constraints or to infer strong genetic effects that may not exist.



Weiss, K. M., & Buchanan, A. V. (2003). Evolution by phenotype: a biomedical perspective. 







It is common, if not usual, to see evolutionary explanations that equate present-day function with selective history. This often assumes steady, gradual selection as the causative agent and accepts the net result of selection as an adequate way to account for the local, day-to-day events that were actually responsible over evolutionary time and space. That verges on a kind of determinism that implies that what is here was destined in advance, and is in part a product of the adaptive illusion.



Weiss, K. M., & Buchanan, A. V. (2004). Genetics and the Logic of Evolution. 









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