LA replies:
First, you are implicitly attributing to a species or to genes the purpose of adapting, as when you speak of “the genetic ability to adapt to the new circumstances.” But there is no genetic ability to adapt, and there is not even any genetic adaptation, words that imply the act and purpose of adapting. There are only accidental, purposeless mutations in genes which by pure happenstance happen to help the possessor of those genes live longer and have more offspring.
Adaptation implies a being or entity that is adapting. But in Darwinism consistently and honestly understood, there is no adaptation on the part of any being. There are only accidental changes in genes, which result in the organism that possesses those genes being a (slightly but significantly) different being from its parents. The organism is thus the epiphenomenon of its genes. The upshot is that there is no entity—neither an organism, nor the species to which it belongs—that does any adapting. “Adaptation” is thus one of those teleological concepts that Darwinians have no right to use, since Darwinism radically excludes not just teleology (as I’ve argued before), but the very existence of any being that could do the adapting.