Art & Creativity Quote by George C. Williams

Williams is yanking the rug out from under one of biology's most seductive shortcuts: treating "the species" as if it were a single, purpose-driven character in a story. His complaint targets a mood more than a mistake - the easy slide into saying a population "evolved to" do X, as though evolution were a committee optimizing for the common good. Williams, a key architect of gene-centered, adaptationist thinking, insists on a colder, tighter logic: natural selection has traction where reproduction actually happens, and that's at the level of individuals (and, more pointedly, the genetic variants they carry). The moment you talk as if a species adapts, you invite group-selection fairy tales: altruism explained as a sacrifice "for the survival of the species", restraint justified as collective prudence, harmony smuggled in as a biological default.

The subtext is methodological discipline. Williams isn't denying that populations change; he's policing what counts as an adaptation and what counts as a byproduct, drift, or constraint. Adaptation is not a vibe; it's an evidentiary claim about design-like fit produced by selection. Scale matters because blame and credit matter: if you attribute a trait to species-level benefit, you stop asking the harder question of how that trait survives the brutal accounting of individual advantage.

Contextually, this lands amid mid-century debates sparked by V.C. Wynne-Edwards and others who leaned on group selection to explain social behaviors. Williams' intent is to make evolutionary storytelling pay its rent: fewer heroic narratives about "what nature wanted", more rigorous explanations about who, exactly, benefits and how that benefit persists.