 Clarke’s functionalism thus leads her to reject “the bottleneck condition” as strictly necessary for evolutionary individuality, a condition that Marc Ereshefsky and Makmiller Pedroso also reject as part of their defense of the view that multispecies biofilms are evolutionary individuals (Ereshefsky &amp; Pedroso 2013, 2015). Clarke’s functionalism thus in principle facilitates the search for alternative mechanisms—perhaps such as lateral gene transfer in the case of biofilms—that serve that function in contexts where the usual material bottlenecks are not present. 