Items related to Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity
Synopsis
What evolution can teach us about the creative process
Since Darwin first noticed micro-changes in the beak size of his famous finches, the theory of natural selection has been our best explanation for how living things adapt to their environments. In the game of survival of the fittest, players adjust little by little, preserving only the steps that improve themselves until they reach the best-possible solution. As logical an answer as natural selection might appear, there is one big problem with it: the real process of evolutionary innovation resembles a rugged mountain range--a smattering of high-peaked successes, surrounded by a handful of less-successful plateaus and even devastating drop-offs. Sometimes stasis is the rule of the day, and sometimes--apparently paradoxically--incremental evolution would seem to require that organisms might need to become less-well adapted before they can become better. The solution seems to be that, rather than taking small steps, life makes great creative leaps. The question is how.
In Life Finds a Way, biologist Andreas Wagner reveals how evolution is capable of such apparent creative genius, and demonstrates that there is a deep symmetry between evolution and human cultural creativity. For instance, in both Picasso's forty iterations of Guernica and the design of self-correcting computer algorithms, we see the same combination of small steps, incessant reshuffling, and large, almost reckless seeming, leaps that characterize the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's grasping claw into a condor's soaring wing. What's more, by connecting these techniques to the fundamental principles of innovation, we are reminded that all humans hold the creative potential to find new solutions to adversity, even after long periods of stagnation or defeat.
Thought-provoking and deeply hopeful, Life Finds a Way encourages us to embrace creativity so that we can adapt, grow, and change. In life as in art, sometimes nature really is the best teacher.
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