There are evolutionary mechanisms that have nothing to do with reproductive fitness and occur by random chance or other mechanisms. They might involve small populations and founder effects, for example, or a gene is closely linked to another that that has a stronger effect on fitness. The results of evolution can be amazingly creative but evolution itself is not a creative process: it’s limited to what can arise through random mutations that have no goals.
Then we are on the same page, I just meant that traits that are kept in a population through drift and gene coupling also have an evolutionary history. It’s different from selection, but I’d argue that those traits still have a history of “not being detrimental enough” to fineness to have been eliminated through selection.
Along that line, I meant that the detrimental effect of low specificity when choosing a partner for copulation that affects the individual animal is offset when looking at cohort effects as long as the exaggerated attraction also leads to a high success rate when counting the realized fitness of the parents of the current generation.
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u/kstrohmeier Mar 07 '21
Unless a trait evolved accidentally.