adaptationistn.adj.

1860 J. J. Thomas Britannia Antiquissima 177 The inventive or imitative faculties given to man, whether Oriental or Occidental, whether Cimmerian futuro-adaptationists, or Indo-European copyists.

1889 Archæol. Rev. 3 203 The ‘Adaptationist’..maintains that the classic and all the other great mythologies have, with more or less intermixture, been derived from one or more definite centres of origin.

1911 Amer. Jrnl. Philol. 32 459 The Flavii were adaptationists, and even hardheaded Vespasian dared but one innovation, and that an economic one.

1972 L. H. Gann & P. Duignan Afr. & World (2000) xxxiii. 474 The Africans whom we have styled prophets often wished to adapt certain features of Western life. The so-called ‘adaptationists’, that is to say the Christian converts, commonly wished to preserve a good deal of their pagan heritage.

2011 R. Rohrbeck Corporate Foresight ii. 16 The adaptationists assert that organizations can change and that the duty of senior management is to prepare for external change and take measures to make the organization adapt.

1904 Bot. Gaz. 38 386 The direct adaptationist conceives of a vital mechanism that looks out for the future, and holds advantageous reactions in readiness for conditions which have never yet occurred!

1909 Amer. Naturalist 43 360 If this change in the Artemisia root is an adaptation, it is an adaptation for [its parasite] the Orobranche and not for itself, and what adaptationist could expect a plant to be so altruistic as all this?

1952 Jrnl. Royal Statist. Soc. B. 14 34 The supporters of the mutation theory have devised theoretical models which can be applied and objectively tested. Have the adaptationists done the same?

1982 R. Dawkins Extended Phenotype iii. 31 History seems to be on the side of the adaptationists, in the sense that in particular instances they have confounded the scoffers again and again.

1997 S. Pinker How Mind Works iii. 166 Because adaptationists believe that the laws of physics are not enough to explain the design of animals, they are also imagined to be prohibited from ever appealing to the laws of physics to explain anything.

2008 J. Alcock & C. Crawford in C. Crawford & D. Krebs Found. Evol. Psychol. ii. 36 This logic undermines the attempts of adaptationists..to understand why living things, including human beings, have certain proximate mechanisms within their bodies and not other forms of those mechanisms with different properties.

1991 Washington Post 22 Sept. c1/2 A temperature rise of two or three or four degrees spread out over 50 or 60 years? No big deal, say these adaptationists.

1992 Washington Times 19 June f2/5 Stephen Schneider was one of the first ‘adaptationists’ (i.e., moderates) in the global warming debate.

2004 Washington Post (Nexis) 6 Oct. c1 He isn't about to be intimidated by a little wind and rain and the occasional growling volcano. He is an adaptationist.

1931 Pan-American Geologist 56 199 Their belief has not been encouraged by experimental biologists, and so has not progressed far beyond the adaptationist doctrines of the Neo-Lamarckians.

1954 Evolution 8 85/1 There is a clearly drawn line between the ‘adaptationist’ and ‘selectionist’ points of view.

1978 Sci. Amer. Sept. 161/1 Their work is informed by the adaptationist program, and their aim is to explain particular anatomical features by showing that they are well suited to the function they perform.

1987 Nature 9 July 121/2 Foley's approach to evolution is strictly neo-darwinian and (despite his protestations) equally strictly adaptationist.

1988 J. Gleick Chaos (U.K. ed.) 201 So an adaptationist explanation for the shape of an organism or the function of an organ always looks to its cause, not its physical cause but its final cause.

2010 Sunday Times (Nexis) 21 Feb. 43 After-the-fact adaptationist accounts of evolutionary change (such as the naked ape above) risk being merely that: plausible but untestable Just So Stories.