Abstract
Exaptation contributes significantly to evolution of entities ‘born and made’, but little has been written about differences and similarities in the way exaptation takes place in the artificial and natural world. We succinctly describe how such processes take place in the natural and artificial world and focus in particular on the dynamic effect between functional shift of a module of an organism (or artifact) and the resulting change at the level where selection occurs. We show that when exaptation is considered from a modular viewpoint, some of the differences that have plagued the analogy between natural and artificial evolution disappears.
A contribution to our chapter of the book ‘Understanding innovation through exaptation’.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
‘Natural Selection, simply and by itself, is potent to explain the maintenance or the further extension and development of favourable variations, which are at once sufficiently considerable to be useful from the first to the individual possessing them. But Natural Selection utterly fails to account for the conservation and development of the minute and rudimentary beginnings, the slight and infinitesimal commencements of structures, however useful those structures may afterwards become’ (Mivart 1871: 24).
- 2.
Difficulties on theory is the title of Chap. VI of Darwin’s Origins of Species (1859).
- 3.
For instance, according to Perry and Sander (2004) the presence of long ribs in early amphibians could suggest the early ‘preadaptation’ (exaptation) of the amphibian ancestors of amniotes to a fully terrestrial life.
- 4.
The atlatl (Shea and Sisk 2010) and a number of much more recent weapons, including ballistas, catapults and crossbows also belong to this class of artifacts.
- 5.
Arthur (2009) argues that new functions and corresponding artifacts typically originate from one of the following two channels: the discovery of a new phenomenon in science and technology, which activates the exploration of the possibilities inherent in the new phenomenon and eventually results in the design and development of new artifacts and processes; the expression of a need that drives the formulation of functions that subsequently are translated into new artifacts.
- 6.
‘In the turbojet case the historical records show how initially the necessary ‘preadapted’ functional modules came both from the aero-engines industry and from diverse and hardly related technological lineages. For instance, in 1936 Power Jets’ industrial partners were British Thompson-Houston, a manufacturer of heavy steam turbines for the electric industry, and Laidlaw, Drew and Company, a Scottish manufacturer of industrial burners’ (Carignani et al. 2019: 523).
- 7.
The nature of ‘preadaptation’ is evident in the following technical report that explains how and why the battery was the critical functional module for the electric car that originated from the cell phone industry: ‘Designed to use commodity, 18650 form-factor, Li-ion cells, the Tesla Roadster battery draws on the progress made in Li-ion batteries over the past 15 years. Under the market pull of consumer electronics products, energy and power densities have increased while cost has dropped making Li-ion the choice for an electric vehicle. In the past, to achieve such a tremendous range for an electric vehicle it would need to carry more than a thousand kilograms of nickel metal hydride batteries. Physically large and heavy, such a car could never achieve the acceleration and handling performance that the Tesla Roadster has achieved. Due to their high energy density, Li-ion batteries have become the technology of choice for laptops, cell phones, and many other portable applications’ (Berdichevsky et al. 2006: 1).
References
Andriani P, Carignani G (2014) Modular exaptation: a missing link in the synthesis of artificial forms. Res Policy 43(8):1608–1620
Andriani P, Cattani G (2016) Exaptation as source of creativity, innovation, and diversity: introduction to the special section. Ind Corp Change 25(1):115–131
Andriani P, Ali A, Mastrogiorgio M (2017) Measuring exaptation and its impact on innovation, search, and problem solving. Organ Sci 28(2):320–338
Arthur WB (2009) The nature of technology. Free Press, New York
Barve A, Wagner A (2013) A latent capacity for evolutionary innovation through exaptation in metabolic systems. Nature 500:203–206
Basalla G (1988) The evolution of technology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Berdichevsky G, Kelty K, Straubel JB, Toomre E (2006) The tesla roadster battery system. Tesla motors report, August 16
Brosius J (2019) Exaptation at the molecular genetic level. Sci China Life Sci 62:437–452
Brun C, Baudot A, Guénoche A, Jacq B (2004) The use of protein-protein interaction networks for genome wide protein function comparisons and predictions. In: Methods in proteome and protein analysis. Springer, Berlin Heidelberg, pp 103–124
Campbell DT (1975) On the conflicts between biological and social evolution and between psychology and moral tradition. Am Psychol 30:1103–1126
Carignani G (2016) On the origin of technology: the invention and evolution of the bow and arrow. In: Panebianco F, Serrelli E (eds) Understanding cultural traits, a multidisciplinary perspective on cultural diversity. Springer, Berlin, pp 315–340
Carignani G, Cattani G, Zaina G (2019) Evolutionary chimeras: a Woesian perspective of radical innovation. Ind Corp Change 28(3):511–528
Cattani G (2006) Technological pre-adaptation, speciation and emergence of new technologies: how corning invented and developed fiber optics. Ind Corp Change 15(2):285–318
Cattani G (2008) Reply to Dew’s (2007) commentary: pre-adaptation, exaptation and technology speciation: a comment on Cattani (2006). Ind Corp Change 17(3):585–596
Chapple CE, Brun C (2015) Redefining protein moonlighting. Oncotarget 6:16812–16813
Chapple CE, Robisson B, Spinelli L, Guien C, Becker E, Brun C (2015) Extreme multifunctional proteins identified from a human protein interaction network. Nat Commun 6:7412
Constant EW (1980) The origins of Turbojet revolution. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD
Cuénot L (1914) Théorie de la préadaptation. Scientia 16:60–73
Darwin C (1859) On the origin of species, 1st edn. John Murray, London
Díaz-Ramos A, Roig-Borrellas A, García-Melero A, López-Alemany R (2012) α-Enolase, a multifunctional protein: its role on pathophysiological situations. J Biomed Biotechnol 2012:156795
Doolittle WF, Brunet TDP, Linquist S, Gregory TR (2014) Distinguishing between “function” and “effect” in genome biology. Genome Biol Evol 6:1234–1237
Franco-Serrano L, Hernández S, Calvo A, Severi MA, Ferragut G, Pérez-Pons J, Piñol J, Pich Ò, Mozo-Villarias Á, Amela I et al (2018) MultitaskProtDB-II: an update of a database of multitasking/moonlighting proteins. Nucleic Acids Res 46:D645–D648
Gero JS (1990) Design prototypes: a knowledge representation schema for design. AI Mag 11(4):26–36
Gould S, Vrba E (1982) Exaptation—a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology 8:4–15
Graur D, Zheng Y, Azevedo RBR (2015) An evolutionary classification of genomic function. Genome Biol Evol 7:642–645
Hartwell LH, Hopfield JJ, Leibler S, Murray AW (1999) From molecular to modular cell biology. Nature 402(6761 Suppl):C47–C52
Henderson B, Fares MA, Martin, AC (2016) Protein moonlighting and new thoughts about protein evolution. In: Protein moonlighting in biology and medicine. Wiley, pp 63–80
Henderson B, Fares MA, Martin ACR (2017) Protein moonlighting in biology and medicine. Wiley, Hoboken, NJ
Hodgkin J (1998) Seven types of pleiotropy. Int J Dev Biol 42:501–505
Jacq B (2001) Protein function from the perspective of molecular interactions and genetic networks. Brief Bioinform 2:38–50
Jeffery CJ (1999) Moonlighting proteins. Trends Biochem Sci 24:8–11
Jeffery CJ (2014) An introduction to protein moonlighting. Biochem Soc Trans 42:1679–1683
Jeffery CJ (2018) Protein moonlighting: what is it, and why is it important? Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci 373
Keeling DM, Garza P, Nartey CM, Carvunis A-R (2019) The meanings of “function” in biology and the problematic case of de novo gene emergence. Elife 8
Khersonsky O, Tawfik DS (2010) Enzyme promiscuity: a mechanistic and evolutionary perspective. Annu Rev Biochem 79:471–505
Kreimer A, Borenstein E, Gophna U, Ruppin E (2008) The evolution of modularity in bacterial metabolic networks. Proc Natl Acad Sci USA 105(19):6976–6981
Lombard LM, Phillipson L (2010) Indications of bow and stone-tipped arrow use 64 000 years ago in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. Antiquity 84(325):635–648
Lyman RL, Van Pool TL, O’Brien MJ (2008) The diversity of North American projectile-point types, before and after the bow and arrow. J Anthropol Archaeol 28(1):1–13
Margulis L, Sagan D (2002) Acquiring genomes: a theory of the origins of species. Basic Books
McBrearthy S (2012) Sharpening the mind. Nature 491:531–532
Mivart G (1871) On the genesis of species. MacMillian, London and New York
Nelson RR, Winter SG (1982) An evolutionary theory of economic change. Belknap Press, Cambridge
Odling-Smee FJ, Laland KN, Feldman MW (2003) Niche construction: the neglected process in evolution. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ
Oltvai ZN, Barabasi AL (2002) Systems biology. Life’s complexity pyramid. Science 298:763–764
Penrose ET (1952) Biological analogies in the theory of the firm. Am Econ Rev 42(5):804–819
Perry SF, Sander M (2004) Reconstructing the evolution of the respiratory apparatus in tetrapods. Respir Physiol Neurobiol 144:125–139
Piatigorsky J, Wistow GJ (1989) Enzyme/crystallins: gene sharing as an evolutionary strategy. Cell 57:197–199
Plach MG, Reisinger B, Sterner R, Merkl R (2016) Long-term persistence of bi-functionality contributes to the robustness of microbial life through exaptation. PLoS Genet 12:e1005836
Rosenberg N (1982) Inside the black box: technology and economics. Cambridge University Press, New York
Schumpeter JA (1911) The theory of economic development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge
Shea JJ, Sisk ML (2010) Complex projectile technology and Homo Sapiens dispersal into western Eurasia. Paleo-anthropology, 100–122
Simon H (1962) The architecture of complexity. Proc Am Philos Soc 106:467–482
Stelling J, Sauer U, Szallasi Z, Doyle FJ, Doyle J (2004) Robustness of cellular functions. Cell 118:675–685
Takiguchi M, Matsubasa T, Amaya Y, Mori M (1989) Evolutionary aspects of urea cycle enzyme genes. BioEssays 10:163–166
Usher AP (1929) A history of mechanical inventions. McGraw-Hill, New York
Wagner A (2012) The role of robustness in phenotypic adaptation and innovation. Proc Biol Sci 279:1249–1258
Wagner A, Rosen W (2014) Spaces of the possible: universal Darwinism and the wall between technological and biological innovation. J R Soc Interface 11:20131190
Woese CR (2002) On the evolution of cells. Proc Natl Acad Sci 99(13):8742–8747
Woese CR (2004) A new biology for a new century. Microbiol Mol Biol Rev 68:173–186
Woese CR, Goldenfeld N (2009) How the microbial world saved evolution from the Scylla of molecular biology and the Charybdis of the modern synthesis. Microbiol Mol Biol Rev 73(1):14–21
Zanzoni A, Ribeiro DM, Brun C (2019) Understanding protein multifunctionality: from short linear motifs to cellular functions. Cell Mol Life Sci 76:4407–4412
Ziman J (2000) Technological innovation as an evolutionary process. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Zinman GE, Zhong S, Bar-Joseph Z (2011) Biological interaction networks are conserved at the module level. BMC Syst Biol 5:134
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Andriani, P., Brun, C., Carignani, G., Cattani, G. (2020). Exaptation and Beyond: Multilevel Function Evolution in Biology and Technology. In: La Porta, C., Zapperi, S., Pilotti, L. (eds) Understanding Innovation Through Exaptation. The Frontiers Collection. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45784-6_6
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45784-6_6
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-45783-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-45784-6
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)