Some traits seem like they provide a decent survival advantage so they come up repeatedly in evolution. Eyes for example evolved dozens of times independently. Cooperation has survival options above individual ones, so those arose in various forms of life (prokaryotes cooperate and become eukaryotes, which cooperate and become multicellular life, which sometimes cooperate and become social animals or social insects).
Is there a term for traits like vision or cooperation which when they come up provide an advantage and as a result they are seen multiple times in various forms of life?
Yeah but those are along a narrow niche. A long beak is successful on a hummingbird. It is not a trait that provides a general evolutionary advantage across most forms of life.
I think a real biologist would be happy to call them ‘advantageous’.
Particularly if you’re talking in a generality, like how vision provides an advantage, I can’t think of a technical term that’s a better fit, and since ‘advantageous’ doesn’t imply conscious choice or design, there’s no reason not to use it even if you’re trying to be careful with your language.
Terms like ‘strongly selected for’ or ‘highly adaptive’ are more technical, and maybe what you’re looking for.
But, as a personal style opinion, if I was talking about something very general, like how so many animals have vision, I’d be inclined to stay away from those technical terms, because to me they imply absolute fact, so I’d feel I needed to qualify them a lot if I was talking in broad generalities, whereas the non-technical term doesn’t imply such precision that I need to qualify it. In other words, I’d be comfortable saying “Vision is pretty advantageous to animals”, but if I got more technical, I’d add qualifiers “For most animals and situations, some type of vision is highly adaptive” (because, for cave fish, vision isn’t adaptive at all.)
Or, rather both are cetaceans, but there is no cladistic distinction between dolphins and whales. If you want to divide up the cetaceans cladistically, it’s toothed and baleen. Dolphins are a type of toothed cetacean, just like Orcas (which are closely related to dolphins).
