Andreas Wagner
Author
Description
"Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. Nature's many innovations-some uncannily perfect-call for natural principles that accelerate life's ability to innovate, its innovability." Darwin's theory of natural selection explains how useful adaptations are preserved over time. But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded him. As genetics pioneer Hugo de Vries put it, "natural selection may explain the survival of the...
Author
Description
Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species-but there's a catch.
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,...
Author
Description
How the principles of biological innovation can help us overcome creative challenges in art, business, and science
In Life Finds a Way, biologist Andreas Wagner reveals the deep symmetry between innovation in biological evolution and human cultural creativity. Rarely is either a linear climb to perfection--instead, "progress" is typically marked by a sequence of peaks, plateaus, and pitfalls. For instance, in Picasso's forty-some iterations of Guernica,...
Author
Pub. Date
2023.
Physical Desc
viii, 336 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Description
"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...
Author
Pub. Date
2014.
Physical Desc
viii, 291 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm
Description
"Wagner draws on over fifteen years of research to present the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using experimental and computational technologies that were heretofore unimagined, he has found that adaptations are not just driven by chance, but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of the time that random variation would take"--Amazon.com.