… whether somehow ‘constraints’ and genetic drift can funnel the progress of evolution towards complex (“designed-looking”) characteristics that confer no adaptive advantage.
(To me, [that] still seems weird and unmotivated, though I’m not ideologically wedded to it being wrong.)
I suppose the epistemological point that Lewontin would harp on here is that if you go in expecting Nature to only do things that seem well-motivated and ‘natural’, then you are going to produce ideologically biased science.
But as to whether evolution can produce complex ‘designed-looking’ characteristics that are not positively adaptive, give a look to this single-topic blog by Arlin Stoltzfus and this paper discussing an idea known as Constructive Neutral Evolution (pdf).
The last features a pretty bizarre definition of “neutral”:
In this broader sense, “neutral” changes would include not only random fixations and genetic hitchhiking (fixation of an allele tightly linked to a selected allele), but also pleiotropic effects of selective allele fixations.
I suppose the epistemological point that Lewontin would harp on here is that if you go in expecting Nature to only do things that seem well-motivated and ‘natural’, then you are going to produce ideologically biased science.
But as to whether evolution can produce complex ‘designed-looking’ characteristics that are not positively adaptive, give a look to this single-topic blog by Arlin Stoltzfus and this paper discussing an idea known as Constructive Neutral Evolution (pdf).
The last features a pretty bizarre definition of “neutral”: