From Cuénot’s préadaptation to Gould and Vrba’s exaptation: a review

Abstract

Early in the twentieth century Lucien Cuénot introduced the concept and term préadaptation, in which the emphasis was on the existence of structures associated with a particular function that could later serve another one. Preadapted characters would have their origin in the heterozygosis of populations. Over that century, various authors referred to preadaptation, and adopted Cuénot’s concept, either implicitly or explicitly. Gould and Vrba introduced the term exaptation (arguing that it was a missing term that explained some evolutionary phenomena) as an alternative to the idea of preadaptation, which they considered to have teleological connotations. However, Cuénot’s original idea did not seem to involve teleology at all; so the initial question arises: What is the relation between the two terms ‘preadaptation’ and ‘exaptation’ from a conceptual point of view? Secondly, we can ask: Does the corresponding process differ from adaptation?

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 11 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.