The Pony Fish's Glow: And Other Clues To Plan And Purpose In Nature

Renowned evolutionary biologist George C. Williams promises Clues to Plan and Purpose in Nature in the subtitle of The Pony Fish's Glow, but he's being ironic. The clues he discusses all point to no plan, and most emphatically to there being no planner. Williams claims to be promoting the "adaptationist program," yet he is an advocate for the middle ground between Stephen Jay Gould and Daniel Dennett. Like the majority of working biologists, Williams believes that most features of organisms can be explained as useful adaptations, but they are adaptations with a past. People are the products of an evolutionary history that leaves even their best- designed features, such as the eye, with bugs that any competent engineer would iron out.