extend/copy sleeping beauties book cover.
Andreas Wagner is interested in the evolution of molecules, species and ideas. He’s a biochemist at the Institute for Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, so he knows that the engine of evolution is random mutations in DNA. But he also knows that this happens all the time. He is interested in the deeper questions: Which mutations are successful, and why? In his latest book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovation in Nature and CultureHe argues that “where” and “when” may be more important questions than “why”.
innovation comes easily
Genetic mutations continually generate molecular changes. “Innovation is not costly and rare, but frequent and cheap,” he puts it. Wagner says that most of these mutations are ultimately harmful to the organism that harbors them; Some are beneficial, and many are neutral. But some of these neutrals may become beneficial millions of years later, when conditions change. These are the sleeping beauties of the title, just lying there, unknowingly waiting to be awakened by Prince Charming’s kiss.
Mammals had all the genetic requirements to thrive for a hundred million years before we did; It wasn’t until the dinosaurs were wiped out, the Earth warmed, and flowering plants diversified that we had an opportunity to occupy the planet. Grasses did not immediately become the dominant species covering the earth, and ants did not immediately spread to 11,000 different species; It took 40 million years for each to come to fruition after the eruption, although by that time each had the biochemical tools to do so. And bacteria resistant to synthetic antibiotics existed millions of years ago – possibly even before humans – but this trait didn’t benefit them (and didn’t threaten us) until we started throwing those antibiotics away in the last century. Did.
Growth is not an upward movement toward an end goal, as depicted on the T-shirt that ends with a picture of a man slumped in his desk chair. Natural selection works not through survival of the fittest, but through survival of the fittest, and the fittest depends as much on external conditions as on any innate ability. Black pepper moths are not inherently better than white pepper moths in any way; They only got fit, and thus survived more often, when the smoke from industry sooted the trunks of the trees on which the moths rested, making the black moths invisible to predators.
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“Any innovation, no matter how life-changing and transformative, does not flourish unless it finds a receptive environment. It needs to be born in the right time and place, or else it will fail,” writes Wagner. “No innovation succeeds on its own merit.” Whether an innovation succeeds depends on the terroir. does.
Changing neuronal firing patterns instead of DNA
so far so good. But Wagner also spent time at the radically interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, which was founded by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann to study complex systems and the myriad ways their individual components interact. Perhaps it was there, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, where he was inspired to apply his idea of sleeping beauties to biological as well as technological and artistic innovations.
So Wagner associates reading, writing, and math-like abilities with symptoms like antibiotic resistance. Our brains haven’t rewired these skills, he says. Wagner argues that all the neural structures that enable them have been present for millennia. These sleeping beauties were not awakened and put to special purposes until external circumstances made them beneficial. In this case, that external circumstance was the Agricultural Revolution. He says that there are still human cultures that haven’t developed calculus because they haven’t needed it. And they’re doing absolutely fine.
Our brains and bodies didn’t evolve to do the things they do now, whether it’s blowing glass or choreographing a ballet. The fact that they can do those things but not others is because the culture puts pre-existing brain structures to those particular uses, which activates a subset of our latent talents. Other cultures in other worlds may have inspired other cultures.
Wagner puts a lot in this category: linear algebra, the law of conservation of energy, the cure for scurvy, the paintings of Van Gogh and Vermeer, the poetry of Dickinson and Keats, the works of Johann Sebastian Bach. and even—shockingly, ironically—the wheel. These were not “successful” when they first appeared—what Wagner defines as finding a place in the historical record—but did so when the world caught on. The scurvy cure and the wheel, among other inventions, were repeatedly invented in different times and places before they arrived at a time and place that was suitable for and could make an impact.
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In some ways, they are like C4 photosynthesis, which grasses evolved long before carbon dioxide levels in the air were low enough to make them beneficial.
Sleeping Beauties: Secrets of Dormant Innovations in Nature and…
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Wagner also emphasizes that analogies themselves are sleeping beauties—that our brains’ ability to connect unrelated concepts “may help explain why our culture is so full of innovations.” He uses similes and metaphors as indicators of the human capacity for abstract thought—our ability to make connections in our mind between things that are not clearly connected to reality, such as comparing a love affair to a To do with travel He writes that these sleeping beauties are “hidden relationships between objects. Such relationships lie dormant until we find an analogy or metaphor that reveals them to us… These relationships remain hidden, inaccessible to us, until a brain circuit reveals them. Do it.” For example, until someone thought about them.
This seems like a stretch. It makes sense that linear algebra would have to wait for technology to develop that would demonstrate its value, and would thus have a dormant period. But analogies and artifacts do not exist outside their creators in the same way that natural laws and biological characteristics do. Applying evolutionary principles designed to explain biological properties and variations in thoughts and behaviors gives them an external reality, a freedom and inevitability that they do not have, like phenotypes.
Wagner ends with advice for future innovators to increase the chances of successfully integrating their innovations into the annals of history: Listen to the world to find out what it wants, then provide it, just as Jonathan Strange did when He had made magical roads for Wellington’s soldiers in Spain. Alternatively, create the environment your creation needs to succeed. This can be the mark of true talent.
Source: arstechnica.com
