Andreas Wagner is interested in evolution, that of molecules, species and ideas. He is a biochemist at the Institute of 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 these happen all the time. He is interested in deeper questions: which mutations succeed and why? In his latest book Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Sleeping Innovations in Nature and Culturehe argues that ‘where’ and ‘when’ are more salient questions than ‘why’.
Innovation comes easy
Genetic mutations constantly lead to molecular changes. “Innovation is not precious and rare, but frequent and cheap,” he says. Wagner says most of these mutations are ultimately harmful to the organism harboring them; a few are favorable and many are neutral. But some of these neutrals could become useful over millions of years as conditions change. These are the sleeping beauties of the title, just lying there, unconsciously waiting to be awakened by a kiss from Prince Charming.
Mammals had all the genetic requirements to thrive in place for a hundred million years before we did; we just didn’t get a chance to take over the planet until the dinosaurs were wiped out, the earth warmed and flowering plants diversified. Grasses didn’t immediately become the dominant species covering the Earth, and ants didn’t immediately radiate into 11,000 different species; it took 40 million years after they appeared on the scene for them to come to fruition, although they all had the biochemical tools to do so all along. And bacteria resistant to synthetic antibiotics existed millions of years ago — possibly even before humans did — but this trait didn’t benefit them (and pose no threat to us) until we started throwing those antibiotics into the last century.
Evolution isn’t an upward progression toward an ultimate goal, as it’s portrayed on that T-shirt that culminates in the photo of that man slumped in his office chair. Natural selection works not by the survival of the best, but by the survival of the fittest, and the fittest depends as much on external conditions as on any innate merit. Black pepper moths are in no way inherently superior to white pepper moths; they became fitter and thus more likely to survive only after smoke from industry covered the logs on which the moths rested in soot, rendering the black moths invisible to predators.
“No innovation, however life-changing and transformative, thrives unless it finds a receptive environment. It must be born at the right time and in the right place or it will fail,” Wagner writes. “No innovation succeeds on its own.” Whether an innovation succeeds all depends on the terroir.
Changing neuronal firing patterns instead of DNA
So far, so good. But Wagner also spent time at the radically interdisciplinary Santa Fe Institute, which Nobel Prize-winning physicist Murray Gell-Mann founded 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, that he was inspired to apply his idea of sleeping beauties to technological and artistic innovations, in addition to biological ones.
So Wagner juxtaposes skills such as reading, writing and arithmetic with properties such as antibiotic resistance. Our brains have not recreated these skills, he says. All of the neural structures that make them possible have been around for millennia, Wagner argues. These sleeping beauties just weren’t awakened and used for those specific purposes until external circumstances made them favorable. In this case, that external circumstance was the agricultural revolution. There are still human cultures that haven’t developed calculus yet, he notes, because they didn’t need to. And they’re doing 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 has used pre-existing brain structures for that particular use, activating a subset of our latent talents. Other cultures on other worlds may have provoked others.
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 compositions of Johann Sebastian Bach. And even – shockingly, ironically – the wheel. These were not “successful” – what Wagner defines as acquiring a place in the historical record – when they were first generated, but only became so when the world caught up with them. In fact, the cure for scurvy and the wheel, among other innovations, were discovered repeatedly, in different times and places, before landing at a time and place convenient for them to catch on and make an impact.
In some ways, they’re like C4 photosynthesis, which grasses evolved long before carbon dioxide levels in the air dropped enough to make it beneficial.
Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Sleeping Innovations in Nature and…
Wagner also emphasizes that analogies themselves are sleeping beauties – that our brains’ ability to connect seemingly unrelated concepts “may help explain why our culture is overflowing with innovation”. He uses analogies and metaphors as indicators of the human capacity for abstract thinking – our ability to make connections in our brains between things that are not clearly connected in reality, such as comparing a love affair to a journey. He writes that these sleeping beauties are “hidden relationships between objects. Such relationships lie dormant until we discover an analogy or metaphor that reveals them to us…these relationships remain hidden, inaccessible to us, until some brain circuit has revealed them.” For example, until someone came up with them.
This looks like a stretch. It makes sense that linear algebra would have to wait for the development of technology to prove its worth, and thus have a dormant period. But analogies and works of art do not exist outside their creators, as natural laws and biological features do. Applying evolutionary principles designed to explain biological traits and diversity to ideas and behaviors gives them an external realness, an independence, and inevitability that they don’t have like phenotypes.
Wagner ends with advice for aspiring innovators to increase the chances of their innovations being successfully integrated into the annals of history: Listen to the world to find out what it wants and then give it, as Jonathan Strange did when he magically built roads for Wellington’s soldiers in Spain. You can also generate the environment your creation needs to succeed. That is perhaps the mark of true genius.
