Exaptive database

Name and history

Exaptation is a really important concept in modern evolutionary biology that refers to how one trait evolves for one function then exapts for a different purpose over time based on environmental conditions.

Adaptation is linear evolution over time, and this is something that we can observe in the fossil record. Dinosaurs are one example of this that goes back millions and millions of years. All dinosaurs used to have feathers (so your school textbooks were wrong!), but these feathers were not originally used for flight, but rather for sexual display purposes and more practically, for warmth. This is an example of a linear evolution.

So how did the feathers evolve for flight? Well, the likely explanation is that one class of dinosaur started to live in the trees. More feathers might have started to develop as its generally colder to live high up in the trees. However over time, you start to see some of your fellow tree-dwellers fall to their death - apart from those who had more feathers, that in fact helped them to glide down more slowly. This is an example of exaptation, as over millions of years feathers have evolved for flight, and we see this now in birds.

This example took a very long time, however there are others in more recently history that demonstrate how this natural phenomenon can be harnessed for innovative purposes. In the 1940s, a Raytheon engineer was maintaining the Megneto of a radar machine and noticed that a chocolate bar melted in his pocket. Apparently, lots of people had noticed this, got annoyed and sent their trousers to the cleaners. However this particular engineer realised the significance of his discovery, and as a result of this we now have microwave ovens. This is an example of exaptive innovation and it relates to how we sense into the affordances of our environments and how we repurpose our existing capabilities in ways that can be more cost-effective than starting again from scrath.

Relevance to your work

Key to harnessing exaptation is bringing in multiple perspectives to increase the likelihood of serendipitous discovery. The Cynefin methods make use of descriptive narratives combined with high abstraction metadata to draw out "the difference that makes a difference" (see Gregory and Nora Bateson on abduction).

References

Books and articles

Brian Arthur

Method card material

This material will be extracted for the method cards

Front page description

Exaptive databases bring together expert signified elements with user experiences to create chance encounters and thus, innovation.

Back of card summary

In this SenseMaker® application, the exaptive database contains elements entered and signified from expert perspectives, which are then matched in novel ways with experiences entered by non-expert users, to create potential for exaptive innovations. The narrative basis is important, since narrative can concentrate contextual knowledge and transmit it alongside its context in a way that codified knowledge cannot always achieve.