Sleeping Beauties
The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture
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Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species – but there’s a catch.
A TIMES AND TELEGRAPH BEST BOOK OF 2023
'Hopeful and fascinating.' THE TIMES
Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these ‘sleeping beauties’ crop up everywhere. But why?
Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed. We have found prehistoric bacteria that harbour the remarkable ability to fight off 21st-century antibiotics. And human history fits the pattern too, as life-changing technologies are invented only to be forgotten, languishing in the shadows before they finally take off.
In probing the mysteries of these sleeping beauties, Wagner reveals a crucial part of nature’s rich and strange tapestry.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Evolutionary "innovations" can lie dormant for millions of years before they become useful, according to this excellent study. Wagner (Life Finds a Way), a biology professor at the University of Zurich, explains that as environments change, gene or protein mutations that previously had no functional value can become transformational. Bacteria, for example, can resist antibiotics neither they nor their ancestors have ever encountered. Additionally, grasses struggled to survive for millions of years until the drying of Earth 23 million years ago provided ideal conditions for the plant to flourish and spread across the globe. Wagner posits that latent adaptations have played a crucial role in human development and cites studies that found the "ancient neural circuitry" implicated in recognizing tools and landscapes is also activated by reading, suggesting written language is the incidental outgrowth of those neural processes. The accessible prose ensures even excursions into molecular biology are comprehensible, and Wagner finds surprising depth in evolutionary history, as when he suggests that the independent discovery of agriculture by human communities across the globe—as well as by ants, which cultivate fungi—casts doubt on individual-centric notions of genius and innovation. This is the rare volume that general readers will enjoy as much as specialists.
