I am a bit confused, is it not the case that a mutation can be passed where it is not beneficial? In the cases of blue beaks does not the ToE permit that the swan’s ancestor was selected for reasons apart of beak color and it just simply was the case that the blue beaks became dominate for reasons apart of beak color?
Let us ignore the (C. Cygnus) for the time being as it may be understood that is was actually specifically selected for some reason and I am not so much interested in that specific animal as the implication I see in the thread that the ToE requires that every mutation is specifically selected directly.
I guess what I am asking, is does the ToE not make provision for a species simply acquiring traits that are neutral to natural selection? By omission, some seem to be suggesting that every single attribute of a species has to further natural selection, while it seems to me that neutral traits could be propagated though a species as long as they weren’t sufficiently detrimental and as long as those traits did not prohibit mating.
Seems to me Creationists spend a lot of time trying to trip up biologists for explanations of traits as if the lack of an explanation from some specific trait somehow disproves ToE. Isn’t an answer that simply sometimes variations within an acceptable range can be insignificant to the overall natural selection process?