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Linguistically. The former words, "pre-adaptive" and "pre-adaptation", were exaptated into the more impressive sounding words, "exaptive" and "exaptation".
And while these new words seem clumsy and serve to obscure meaning, it behooves grant-gathering science to sound important when they mumble the holy rites of their particular trade.
Yeahbut©, exaptive and exaptation say what they mean, pre-adaptive and pre-adaptation don't. On a clumsy and obscurantist scale I would put pre-adapt well above exapt. If pre-adative and pre-adaptation meant anything at all, they would mean that they started out useless and only took on a use after being fully formed.
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old hand
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"Yeahbut," Faldage sez," expatation and exaptive say what they mean, pre-adaptive and pre-adaptation don't."
Oh my, said Alice to the Queen, Words mean just what you say they mean, nothing more and nothing less.
Still, at the risk of overstating the obvious, I offer you this line of reasoning, and just on the half-chance that it was the hyphens that confused you, I have eliminated them for your viewing pleasure.
Evolution is nothingbut adaptation. The term preadaptation only has meaning in the context of a subsequent adaptation. This is the way it has been used by paleontologists for forty years.
On the other hand, an "ex" prefix before adaptation would indicate that the prior adaptation, like an ex-wife, no longer exists. This is not the case in most adaptations. But
sometimes it is, so if limited it to those rare circumstances, I, for one, could see a use for exadaptation.
But why would anyone embrace the godawful, artificial, contracted, word "exaptation"?
Has paleontology suddenly developed an aversion to long words? Has someone uncovered a secret of evolution so sublime that it requires a whole new word to encompass the concept?
Can't our language have a logical continuity?
Milum.
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Oh my, said Alice to the Queen, Words mean just what you say they mean, nothing more and nothing less.
Or Humpty Dumpty to Alice or whatever.
It's always nice if, when confronted by a new word, that one can deduce its meaning from the word itself as well as from the context. Ignoring the fact that ex-wives don't necessarily cease to exist or even cease to be wives, they merely cease to be one specific person's wife, the word adapt breaks up into ad- and apt, the individual elements meaning toward, to and to become fit respectively. Exapt (not exadapt) breaks up into ex- and apt, the ex- meaning out of, from and the apt as before. In the former we are stressing that something has moved toward a use for which it has become fit and in the latter that it has moved from some other use to become fit for a new use. Pre-adapt sounds like introducing a woman as your future ex-wife.
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actually, Stephen J. Gould, arguably one of the most accessible evolutionary biologists of the day, had a rationale for coining the word exaptation. you could look it up, but it boils down to this: he wanted a term that would include pre-adaptation and another concept which has been called "spandrels". Gould has written a paper suggesting that the word “spandrel” be used in biology to name features that arise without initial adaptive functions (e.g., those that are architectural by-products of development) but take on new functions later in evolution (Gould 1997).
Gould had earlier proposed, in a paper with Elizabeth Vrba (Gould and Vrba 1982), that we call traits that perform a current adaptive function but arose either for some other function or with no adaptive function at all [my emphasis] as “exaptations.” Thus both preadaptations and “spandrels” qualify as exaptations. The terminology may seem very nitpicky, but it forces us to think about the details of a trait and how it might have evolved, and it forces us to go beyond the mere creation of plausible stories in the study of adaptation. http://biosci264.bsd.uchicago.edu/adaptation.html
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tsuwm, fascinating.
Your post crossthreads in that your link includes, among the many further links therein, a cameelious reference to Kipling’s “How the Camel Got Its Hump.”
However, I found that several of the links in it do not work. If you have any further information, please let me know; I find this subject of great interest. Thank you.
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Here me n milum are having us a nice knock down drag out argument without neither of us knowing the least what we're talking about and you have to come in and spoil it with a bunch of moldy old facts!
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Oh I don't know, Faldage, and so do you.
Milum.
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Yer, nice one tsuwm. I had a close encounter of the lecturer kind with SJG and Lewontin, not to mention the spandrels in San Marco, myself many moons ago. Post-grad psychology paper. Yum. Not. From memory I got a B for the paper and couldn't work out how I did so well for so little effort ...
The idiot also known as Capfka ...
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