1284 THE STRUCTURE OF EVOLUTIONARY THEORY
order changeth, yielding place to new... lest one good custom should corrupt the
world.") If reduced conflict builds supercolonies of such competitive success, why
does the same species live so differently, and so much more modestly, in its native
Argentinian abode?
Queller (2000, p. 520) presents the interesting and cogent explanation that, by
losing their capacity to identify degrees of kinship, the ants "cannot improve or even
sustain their cooperative behavior. Without relatedness, adaptive modifications of
cooperative worker behavior cannot be favored and maladaptive ones cannot be
disfavored." Queller (op. cit.) therefore concludes that the randomly established
feature (the miltonic insinuation) behind transient triumph must also spell eventual
doom: "Random drift will become important again, this time because of the absence
of any opposing force rather than a small population size. The ants are like a casino
gambler who is lucky once but cannot quit: chance got them their stake, but over the
long run it can only lead to ruin." Thus, either the California ants will eventually
restore their genetic variability, split into fighting colonies, and become restricted to
smaller overall populations with greater staying power; or they will suffer "the
lingering death of decay by drift" (p. 520). Tsutsui et al. (2000) propose what, to most
people, would sound like an absurd and counterintuitive strategy for control, although
the suggestion clearly makes theoretical (but perhaps not practical) sense to anyone
schooled in the intricacies of evolutionary theory: introduce more ants with
substantial variation at those microsatellite loci, thus encouraging self-regulation by
the reinitiation of conflict!
Thus, in summarizing the categories in my proposed taxonomy of the exaptive
pool, the currently unused but eminently usable features that build the ground of
differential evolvability fall into two groups of inherent potentials (franklins) and
available things (miltons). Miltons, in turn, include three distinct groupings ordered
by different sources of origin. The exaptive pool therefore contains:
- Potentials (franklins)
- Consequences (miltons arising as spandrels)
- Manumissions (miltons arising by unemployment)
- Insinuations (miltons arising by random drift)
All taxonomies—thus embodying the richness of fascination of systematics as a
scientific subject (Gould, 2000c)—mix aspects of nature's objective order with
human preferences for utility or intelligibility. Even if we allow that these four
categories exist "out there" in nature—and even I, although I developed this scheme,
would not go so far in trying to craft a naturalistic defense, for I recognize that the
objective items of the exaptive pool could be parsed in other ways—our decisions
about their ranking and secondary ordering require a choice among several logically
legitimate alternatives. All taxonomies base such choices on the designation of a
fundamentum divisionis, or basis of primary ordering. The differences among
alternative fundamenta reflect the theories we favor as most useful in understanding
and