Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture

This wonderful work applies an important idea to varied subjects: natural history, cellular biology and culture. I suspect some of the sections on cellular biology may be challenging for readers who have not an acquaintance with the subject, but this should not preclude enjoyment of the rest of the book. The idea is that the right environment is required to fully realize latent potential. In natural history, Wagner is talking about evolutionary success. For example, grasses were around, but did not become so important until the climate became dryer, 43 million years after their origin. Birds evolved their adaptations for flight during the heyday of the other dinosaurs, including other dinosaurs who could fly, but their “big bang”, as for mammals, occurred after the demise of the other dinosaurs. In cellular biology one source of potential is promiscuous enzymes. While they may have a limited number of functions in an existing organism, they are capable of catalyzing many other types of reactions, albeit perhaps not as efficiently. Thus, organisms can often metabolize nutrients they are not currently exposed to; also, when mutations arise they are more likely to offer new capabilities. It is also one reason bacteria may already be resistant to antibiotics they have never been exposed to. Organisms have many stretches of DNA which are currently not contributing to success; this “useless” DNA is dynamic, some being lost, added or mutated. For any of this DNA to contribute to evolution, it must first be transcribed into RNA which means an initial block of a stretch of DNA must be recognized by a regulatory protein. Just as there are promiscuous enzymes, cells produce many different regulatory proteins, and each of these is generally capable of recognizing many DNA “words”. Thus, not only is the “useless” DNA dynamic, but there is sometimes new RNA produced from it is. Some of this new or existing “useless” RNA can ultimately be adaptive or drive evolution. Why do cultural discoveries sometimes lie dormant? Some of the reasons “may involve little more than dumb misfortune, like Mendel living in an academic backwater. Others include entrenched prejudice, inertia to change and marketing power. Still others are scientific discoveries or technological developments that lie in the future” and are necessary to capitalize on a scientific discovery.“Opportunity may be the mother of invention.” For animals “opportunity may arise from abundant tool material (e.g. rocks), to abundant prey, to the safety of a zoo. (captivity bias)”. Safety allows more time for play. I have known about molecular clocks, but reading this book stimulated the realization that molecules are not always DNA, but often the resulting protein. This has to be. To quote Wikipedia: “few studies have succeeded in amplifying DNA from remains older than several hundred thousand years.” Amplification is a step in sequencing the DNA. Wagner describes the amazing capabilities and results from computer programs utilizing a metabolic data base. I infer this data base includes all the alternative inputs and outputs for each metabolic step, as well as all the enzymes which can catalyze each reaction.

This book is worth reading if you are interested in esoteric topics around innovation, science, nature and how that all comes together.

Traditionally people assume that survival of the fittest dictates evolution. The author describes many instances of genetic changes that lay dormant until favorable conditions arise. Once conditions become favorable, these sleeping beauties become dominant. If conditions do not become favorable, they can stay dormant almost forever. A really interesting perspective on evolution.

that actually generated a wonderful review in the Wall Street Journal.......above all, nature will find a way.

Andreas Wagner is an evolutionary biologist whose many years engaged with the vibrant, international complexity theory community centered around the Santa Fe Institute has produced not only a fecund evolutionary biology research programme at the University of Zurich, but as well an exemplary capacity to translate interdisciplinary complexity theory and his own lab's biology research findings into a rigorous theory of innovation at loggerheads with our inegalitarian conservative era's dumb, tech-driven, counterproductive management dogmas, including cheapening academic labor by surveilling and evaluating academic workers for their immediate impact. Wagner carefully shows that within Earth's biosphere, innovation is not only wondrous, but ubiquitous. What we recognize as "innovations" manifest largely ex post facto as a convergence with an unpredictably-changing environment. Wagner proceeds to demonstrate the same principle is true in human society, though we also can cohere labor to agentially direct environmental change over many decades and centuries.I highly recommend this insightful, sound book for all biologists, historians, sociologists, but as well to anyone whose mental health suffers because their innovative efforts are not currently recognized or finding purchase. We are social; we suffer without affirmation. But to make an impact, do what you can to take care of yourself and pull yourself together enough to develop your work and put it out there, Wagner recommends, because the manifestation of innovation is a lottery, and it's all about buying more tickets, as it were--if only to win after you die, like so many of humanity's heroes before you. You need to get your innovations out there. You put a lot out there, some will land.

Everyone knows that men produce far more sperm than can ever fertilise an egg. But women too produce far more eggs (about 25,000) than they could ever hope to turn into children.Such redundancy may be understandable if the purpose of life is more life. In other respects one might suppose that nature is fairly parsimonious.Not a bit of it. Living things have an extraordinary abundance of surplus. This marvellous book describes a host of ways in which living beings preserve ancestral forms now useless, or (the author alleges) kept in reserve "just in case". "Junk" DNA is just the start of it. Useless mutations are only discarded if they actually lead to death.The last chapters move from biology to culture. Many scientific breakthroughs were ignored until rediscovered sometimes centuries later. Inventions often remain unexploited until long after the patents have expired. I would add that some things take a surprisingly long time (in retrospect) to be invented. Felt was known over 3,000 years ago and could have been used to keep eggs from breaking, but the humble egg box was invented only just over a hundred years ago.I highly recommend this book. Although written by an academic whose first language is presumably not English (he's Swiss) it has an easy and fluent style which made reading it a pleasure.