Doesn't anybody ever read Stephen Jay Gould or Niles Eldredge?? Strict adaptationism is not supported by empirical evidence; it's a collection of plausible "just so" stories (Gould's phrase, not mine!) Yes, they make good media sound bites, and they are currently fashionable, probably for that reason. It's fun to sit around and come up with stories. It doesn't sound as good to say, "We really don't know. The giraffe may have a long neck for an adaptionist reason, or this feature may have come about as an exaptation, something that evolved who-knows-why and was later adapted for its current use." One day soon, this line of thought will look every bit as stupid as when Freudian theories were advanced to explain absolutely every facet of human behavior.
If every single place you go wasn't airconditioned down to a ridiculously low temperature all summer long, that would CERTAINLY help to save electricity. It is just not necessary to have every single indoor space twenty, twenty-five, and thirty degrees cooler than the outdoors (and in the South, that's exactly what it is for three to five months a year.) The city where I live was founded two hundred years before air conditioning, and people somehow managed to get by. They would get used to it again!
Pretty cool stuff. :) But new information is never going to undermine anti-evolutionary arguments, because they aren't arguments at all. (Does this really need to be said? Never mind... yes it does...) Just go and read this article about the non-overlapping magisteria of science and religion: http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html
Let's see. Denmark is the top meat-eating country in the world, but their obesity rate is only 11%. Health statistics from the Denmark Ministry of Health show that the rate of heart disease has fallen by 20 percent between 2001 (before the Danish national trans fats ban) and 2006 (two years after the trans fats ban). The USDA website *itself* shows that as our intake of all saturated fats has dropped by one-third over the past thirty years, American obesity rates have skyrocketed. The U.S has yet to ban trans fats. How long is it going to take before all the nonsense about saturated fats being dangerous is dropped and the USDA BANS TRANS FATS in order to do something about our obesity rate???
Well, what do y'all want? That's the kind of profound comment this story evokes.
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_noma.html