Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.
Feathers, for example originally evolved as a method for temperature regulation, but today their airfoil-shape helps birds fly.
Ideas are often similarly repurposed along the way. Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web as a tool for scholars, but in the course of time it became a network for shopping, social networking and pornography, among other things.
