“Adaptation”
A Loosely Applied Term
This term “adaptation” that is used every day in science instruction is used in two ways: one that seems
to make sense and one that does not. Though a teacher may tell us otherwise, in both cases the
implication seems to be that these “adaptations,” are somehow a decision that is made on the part of
the organism, as if its gene code could somehow recognize an environmental change and respond to it.
This implication is inherent in the dictionary definition of “adapt,” which uses words such as “make,”
“become,” and “modify,” which imply deliberate action. And yet, educators are quick to remind us that
these changes are the result of chance, not deliberate action, despite the dictionary verbiage. Even so,
only the latter interpretation makes sense in one case, but neither interpretation make sense in the
other case. The term “adaptation” is much too loosely applied.
Case 1: Environmental change favors a variation. It is easy to understand an adaptation that occurs
because of a simple variation in one characteristic of a life form. Take color, for example. If an
organism comes in more than one color variety, and its environment changes such that one color might
become more camouflaged in the new environment, it is not hard to deduce that the organism with the
newly camouflaged color will have a higher survival rate and thus change the gene pool, perhaps even
permanently. What is unreasonable to assume it that this happens due to anything other than chance.
Clearly, no decision was made on the part of the organism to change colors in order to survive. The
organism’s DNA already allowed for color variation, and by chance an environmental change created
circumstances more favorable to one color than another. This is an occurrence even a young student
can comprehend, something with which logic cannot argue, and something teachers don’t dispute.
Case 2: Critical survival feature is inborn. It is not at all easy to understand why someone would call a
shell, or lungs, or gills, or feet an adaptation. Are we to believe that there was an organism that existed
in a form in which some had, say, gills and some did not, and an environmental change occurred which
favored the variation that had gills? Really? The implications of such a belief are comical, if not utterly
ridiculous. What kind of organism would it be? Does an organism exist today which is in such a state of
radical transformation? Why would we assume one would have existed in the past? The answer has to
be an emphatic “No.” That is because supposed “adaptations” such as gills are not merely cosmetic
variations like color, or minor functional variations like long legs versus short. Gills are an absolute
survival necessity. They are entire organ systems, consisting of numerous structural and functional
components which all must work in concert for the organism even to live at all. Are we to believe an
organism would be born with such variation that it would have spontaneously created such a complex
organ system? What gene code could have emerged that could possibly induce such a radical change?
A mutation? Students are taught routinely about mutations occurring in the gene pool, and these are
always only something relatively minor in that they involve one or two codes that are in error and thus
transform only a few characteristics, and in any case never generate an entire functional organ system,
much less one totally alien to an existing life form. No teacher in his or her right mind would teach
mutation beyond this. Why is it expected that they should abandon reason and extrapolate this concept
into something as elaborate as an organ system, just because the subject domain has shifted to
paleontology? Are both the laws of genetics and the lawlessness of chaos to be dispensed with
altogether? If anything, mutations have a tendency to degrade an organism, or at best make it slightly
different and increase its survival chances by some amount, subject to the whims of its environment.
Never has an example been documented in which an entire organ system, or an entire functional
apparatus, has emerged from a mutation. If anything, entire organ systems or functional apparatuses
have been destroyed by mutations, when instructions in the gene code have been corrupted and thus
do not produce what they are supposed to produce. Can any instance be cited in which mutation
produces a newly functioning system; that is, creates order out of chaos? No. If not, then why is this
term “adaptation” applied so loosely? The only possible answer must be a bias against the notion that
an organism can come ready-made with genetic instructions that tell that organism to be precisely that
organism and only that organism, with variations included and necessarily a part of the mosaic of the
species, and survival of each variation then being at the mercy of its environment. How a logical person
could not reason this out is baffling, but if we assume that scientists don’t make assumptions before
they reason, then we are as guilty of assuming as they!