I think you’re using the term a bit differently from how I use it! I usually think of polytely (which is just pleiotropy from a different perspective, afaict) as an *obstacle*. That is, if I’m trying to optimize a single pasta sauce to be the most tasty and profitable pasta sauce in the whole world, my optimization is “polytelic” because I have *compromise* between maximizing its tastiness for [people who prefer sour taste], [people who prefer sweet], [people who have some other taste-preferences], etc. Another way to say that is that I’m doing “conjunctive search” (neuroscience term) for a single thing which fits multiple ~independent criteria.
Still in the context of pasta sauce: if you have the logistical capacity to instead be optimizing *multiple* pasta sauces, now you are able to specialize each sauce for each cluster of taste-preferences, and this allows you to net more profit in the end. This is called “horizontal segmentation”.
Likewise, a gene which has several functions that depend on it will be evolutionarily selected for the *compromise* between all those functions. In this case, the gene is “pleiotropic” because its evolving in the direction of multiple niches at once; and it is “polytelic” because—from the gene’s perspective—you can say that “it is optimizing for several goals at once” (if you’re willing to imagine the gene as an “optimizer” for a moment).
For example, the recessive allele that causes sickle cell disease (SCD) *also* causes some resistance against malaria. But SCD only occurs in people who are homozygous in it, so the protective effect against malaria (in heterozygotes) is common enough to keep it in the gene pool. It would be awesome if, instead, we could *horizontally segment* these effects so that SCD is caused by variations in one gene locus, and malaria-resistance is caused by variations in another locus. That way, both could be optimized for separately, and you wouldn’t have to choose between optimizing against SCD or Malaria.
Maybe the notion you’re looking for is something like “modularity”? That is approximately something like the opposite of pleiotropy. If a thing is modular, it means you can flexibly optimize subsets of it for different purposes. Like, rather writing an entire program within a single function call, you can separate out the functions (one function for each subtask you can identify), and now those functions can be called separately without having to incur the effects of the entire unsegmented program.
You make me realize that “polytelic” is too vague of a word. What I usually mean by it may be more accurately referred to as “conjunctively polytelic”. All networks trained with something-like-SGD will evolve features which are conjunctively polytelic to some extent (this is just conjecture from me, I haven’t got any proof or anything), and this is an obstacle for further optimization. But protein-coding genes are much more prone to this because e.g. the human genome only contains ~20k of them, which means each protein has to pack many more functions (and there’s no simple way to refactor/segment so there’s only one protein assigned to each function).
KOAN: The probability of rolling 60 if you toss ten six-sided dice disjunctively is 1/6^10. Whereas if you glom all the dice together and toss a single 60-sided die, the probability of rolling 60 is 1⁄60.
I wrote a comment on {polytely, pleiotropy, market segmentation, conjunctive search, modularity, and costs of compromise} that I thought people here might find interesting, so I’m posting it as a quick take: