Adaptation: “A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought”

Abstract

In his classic Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (1966), George Williams showed definitively that our understanding of adaptation, a central concept of evolutionary theory, must be gene-centered. The purpose of adaptations is to further the replication of genes. Genes are machines for turning out more genes; and adaptations are the means by which genes pluck resources from the world to promote this self-replication. Thus adaptations transform potential resources from part of the indifferent world-at-large into tailor-made environments, environments brimming with resources for organisms' distinctive adaptive needs. Systematically dif ferent adaptive problems therefore give rise to different environments; and so different species, for example, have different environments. Thus a gene-centered analysis of adaptations implies a gene-centered theory of environments. Without genes to specify what constitutes an environment, environments would not exist. Rather than being separate from biology, an autonomous, independent force, environments are themselves the products of biology. So a gene-centered view, far from depreciating the environment, furnishes a rich and precise understanding of its importance.