Life Finds a Way
What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
How can new insights into evolution help us solve problems in life, art, business and science?
‘A wonderful, mind-expanding book. Prepare to be surprised, enlightened and awed.’ Alice Roberts, author of Ancestors
In Darwin’s survival of the fittest, each step must be uphill as life progresses towards an evolutionary peak. There is no turning back. So what happens when life needs to cross a valley in the wilds of an adaptive landscape to reach the highest summit?
World-renowned biologist Andreas Wagner reveals that life does not only walk – it also leaps.
Drawing on pioneering research, Wagner explores life’s creative process and how it bears a striking resemblance to how we humans work. A beguiling symmetry links Picasso struggling through forty versions of Guernica and the way evolution transformed a dinosaur’s claw into a condor’s wing. This new understanding is already revolutionising our approach to problem-solving across the sciences. In the near future, applied in spheres as diverse as the economy and education, it will enable us to do so much more.
Life Finds a Way is a thought-provoking and deeply hopeful look at the force that shapes our world.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this intricate but accessible work, evolutionary biologist Wagner draws a fascinating analogy between how nature innovates to optimize itself and how human creativity works. He introduces a conceptual tool from his discipline, the "adaptive landscape," a graphic resembling a "topographic map of a mountain range," which organisms "climb" by evolving. Strict natural selection can allow one to reach the nearest peak a beneficial characteristic but doesn't tolerate backward steps, making other, possibly higher peaks inaccessible. However, other climbing strategies recombination through alternative splicing of DNA and through sexual reproduction allow more landscape to be traversed. Wagner then moves the model to algorithmic problem solving, describing "genetic algorithms" that use multiple starting points and random mutations. Applying his model to creativity, he shows how mental landscapes are built similarly, by exploring different realms of knowledge and making "unusual combinations of experience and expertise" akin to DNA recombination. A brief foray into cultural implications which recommends the cultivation of diversity and autonomy instead of hypercompetition in education and academia is comparatively ill-developed and out of place. Nonetheless, this enjoyable popular science book, easy to follow without ever becoming oversimplistic, provides an intriguing new perspective on the mechanisms of innovation, whether molecule or symphony.
