Why specific design is not the mark of the adaptational
Jerome C. Wakefield a1 a1 School of Social Work and Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research, Rutgers – The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, NJ 08901
jcw2@rutgers.rci.edu
Abstract
Andrews et al.'s analysis suffers from a series of conceptual confusions they inherit from Gould's work. Their proposal that adaptations can be distinguished from exaptations essentially by specific design criteria fails because exaptations are often maintained and secondarily adapted by natural selection and therefore, over evolutionary time, can come to have similar levels of design specificity to adaptations.
