Quotes About Evolution

where small niches can flourish.

New ideas need old buildings.

An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

In the case of the vacuum tube, it trained our ears to enjoy a sound that would no doubt have made Lee De Forest recoil in horror. Sometimes the way a new technology breaks is almost as interesting as the way it works.

The platform builders and ecosystem engineers do not just open a door in the adjacent possible. They build an entire new floor.

Innovations usually begin life with an attempt to solve a specific problem, but once they get into circulation, they end up triggering other changes that would have been extremely difficult to predict. This is a pattern of change that appears constantly in evolutionary history.

Build a tangled bank.

Sometimes the effect arrives thanks to a different kind of breakthrough: a dramatic increase in our ability to MEASURE something, and an improvement in the tools we build for measuring. New ways of measuring almost always imply new ways of making.

the "hummingbird effect." An innovation, or cluster of innovations, in one field ends up triggering changes that seem to belong to a different domain altogether.

Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.

One gets the sense that Darwin would have been an avid Fitbit user.)

Before tube amplifiers, the limits of our vocal chords made it difficult to speak to more than a thousand people at a time. (The elaborate vocal stylings of opera singing were in many ways designed to coax maximum projection out of the biological limitations of the voice.)

What happened in the United States is now happening on a planetary scale, too.

Está en la naturaleza de las buenas ideas el subirse a hombros de los gigantes que las precedieron, lo que implica que, en alguna medida, toda innovación importante resulta ser fundamentalmente una red.

When nature is in need of new ideas, it strives to connect, not protect.

Steven Johnson

Steven Johnson

exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.

Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.

Nature's innovations, too, rely on spare parts. Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses.

that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favors the connected mind.

The same pattern appears again and again throughout the evolution of life. Indeed, one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.

Sony inaugurated research into the first consumer videocassette recorder in 1969, but didn't ship its first Betamax for another seven years, and VCRs didn't become a household necessity until the mid-eighties.

Evolutionary biologists have a word for this kind of borrowing, first proposed in an influential 1971 essay by Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba: exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.