Natural selection explains adaptation to a specific environment better than any of the effects you cited. It is the aggregate response of a species to the stimuli of its environment and the species' adaptation to it.
Species don't exhibit responses, individuals do...just as populations don't have physical traits, individuals do.
What you're essentialy promoting here is psychology, and psychology is not a science.
If natural selection can not explain physical changes within an organism, that are't already explained by mutation, drift, recombination, and heredity, then it has no business being in a scientific theory.
What is so hard to understand about that.
I'll tell, you guys have worn me out. Why is it so hard to answer a simple question about a mechanism, that supposedly is an observabble fact of nature.