Life Finds a Way

by Andreas Wagner

  Copyright

  Copyright © 2019 by Andreas Wagner

  Cover design by Chin-Yee Lai

  Cover image copyright © Darrell Gulin/Getty Images

  Cover copyright © 2019 Hachette Book Group, Inc.

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  First Edition: June 2019

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  The Library of Congress has cataloged the hardcover edition as follows:

  Names: Wagner, Andreas, 1967 January 26– author.

  Title: Life finds a way : what evolution teaches us about creativity / Andreas Wagner.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046693 (print) | LCCN 2018047908 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541645356 (ebook) | ISBN 9781541645332 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Evolution (Biology)—Philosophy. | Creative ability.

  Classification: LCC QH360.5 (ebook) | LCC QH360.5 .W34 2019 (print) | DDC 576.801—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046693

  ISBNs: 978-1-5416-4533-2 (hardcover); 978-1-5416-4535-6 (ebook)

  E3-20190425-JV-NF-ORI

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prologue

  CHAPTER 1 The Cartography of Evolution

  CHAPTER 2 The Molecular Revolution

  CHAPTER 3 On the Importance of Going Through Hell

  CHAPTER 4 Teleportation in Genetic Landscapes

  CHAPTER 5 Of Diamonds and Snowflakes

  CHAPTER 6 Creative Machines

  CHAPTER 7 Darwin in the Mind

  CHAPTER 8 Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost

  CHAPTER 9 From Children to Civilizations

  EPILOGUE More than Metaphors

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Bibliography

  Figure Credits

  Also by Andreas Wagner

  Notes

  Index

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  Prologue

  Long before life itself arose, nature created not just swirling galaxies and the thermonuclear engines of suns. It also created glittering crystals, like the diamonds that take millions of years to gestate in the womb of our planet. And it created the complex organic molecules found in interstellar gases, meteorites, and deep-sea vents that would become the building blocks of life. Once these building blocks had assembled into the earliest living cells, Darwinian evolution kicked in. It taught life to sate its boundless hunger by harvesting energy from sunlight and from energy-rich molecules. Equipped with molecular power plants, life could then conquer every habitat of our planet, from open equatorial oceans to frigid Arctic ice shelves, from hot subsurface rocks to endless arid plains and ice-sheathed mountains.

  As time passed, life’s single cells assembled into specialized teams with thousands, millions, and eventually billions of members. These multicellular organisms evolved sensors that helped them navigate the world by smell, sound, and light. They learned to escape enemies and attack prey by burrowing, swimming, walking, and flying. And, eventually, their nervous systems evolved complex brains that could create and comprehend abstract symbols, such as those on this page. To them we owe the cave paintings of Lascaux and the landscapes of Monet, simple abacuses and complex supercomputers, Sumerian accounting tablets and James Joyce’s Ulysses, Pythagoras’s theorem and Schrödinger’s equation.

  As different as all these may appear, they are all products of nature’s creativity, a phrase that might bring to mind the finches that use tools to scare insects from hideouts, or the chimpanzees that fashion primitive spears to hunt bush babies. But I mean a more universal form of creativity manifest in chemistry, biology, and culture.

  Much of human creativity fits a definition widely used by psychologists: a creative idea or product is an original and appropriate solution to a problem.1 Some problems are simple, such as how to hold a stack of paper together, and these problems often have simple solutions—staples or paper clips. Other problems are mind-bogglingly complex, such as how to beat humans in strategy board games like Go, and so are their solutions—artificial intelligences like AlphaGo. These examples are technological, but defining creativity as problem solving is useful in many other domains, including the arts. Yale University’s George Kubler—a towering art historian of the twentieth century—said: “Every important work of art can be regarded… as a hard-won solution to some problem.”2 And that’s more than just one man’s opinion. We will later see that artificial intelligences can use problem-solving strategies to create artistic products, like stirring melodies. To be sure, today’s artificial intelligences are not on a par with the greatest human creators, and perhaps no psychological definition of creativity will ever be able to capture a Mozart symphony, a Picasso painting, or a Rodin sculpture. But the psychological definition of creativity is still immensely useful because it covers a broad spectrum of human creative expression.

  Even more important, it is useful far beyond human affairs because it applies to problems that life solved before brains like ours—or any brains at all—arose. An enzyme that cracks the chemical bonds of an energy-rich molecule is one solution to the problem of how to harvest energy. The optical marvels of eyes are solutions to the problem of how to escape predators or hunt prey. And the antifreeze proteins of cold-blooded animals are a solution to the problem of how to survive in subzero temperatures. Viewing creativity as problem solving is even relevant for problems that the universe solved long before life itself arose. A crystal, for example, is a solution to the problem of how to find a stable arrangement of atoms or molecules.

  I am an evolutionary biologist, and my life’s work is to understand the creative powers of biological evolution that are embodied in microscopic algae and giant redwood trees, in gut bacteria and African elephants. Every one of the millions of species alive today is the most recent link in a nearly endless chain of creative achievement that goes back all the way to life’s origins. Every organism is the product of countless innovations, from the molecular machines inside its cells to the physical architecture of its body. They account for life-forms that move at lightning speed, are perfectly camouflaged, or are covered with solar panels. Life’s overflowing creativity fascinates me to no end.

  At my Zurich laboratory, a team of some twenty researchers and I study the DNA of diverse organisms to investigate how nature creates new forms of life and new kinds of molecules. We also observe microbes in the laboratory over thousands of generations to study how they evolve to surmount seemingly insurmountable challenges. A
nd we compare how their exploits resemble creative processes in other fields, including how crystals take shape, how molecules self-assemble, and how algorithms solve problems.

  But I am not just a scientist. I am also a father and an educator, and I am looking for better ways to raise children, to educate the next generation of scientists, to hire the most creative researchers, and to build and sustain a team of them. These very practical problems have led me to explore a vast literature on human psychology, education research, organizational management, and the economics of innovation. In these explorations I have discovered astonishing similarities between natural and human creativity.

  This book is about these similarities and much more. First, it is about things Charles Darwin did not know. His theory of evolution by natural selection was a monumental achievement, but it was only a beginning. One of the things Darwin did not—could not—know is that natural selection can face obstacles that it alone cannot overcome. This book explains what these obstacles are. And it explains the mechanisms of evolution that can overcome them.

  Second, this book illustrates the similarities between human creativity and a modern, augmented view of Darwinian evolution. These similarities are not only numerous but also deep, as psychological, historical, and biological research will testify later in the book.

  Third, and perhaps most important, this book explains how these similarities can help us solve many of the problems facing humans today. They can help us raise children to live more fulfilling lives, enhance businesses innovation, and prepare entire nations for a world where innovation drives global leadership.

  One reason why creativity in nature and culture are similar is that difficult problems—how to create a regular diamond lattice, an energy-efficient predator, or a sensitive radio antenna—share a fundamental property: they have myriad solutions—many of them poor, some a bit better, fewer really good, and a rare few that are superb—and we can think of these solutions as forming a mountainous landscape, where poor solutions correspond to low foothills and the best solutions form the highest peaks (Figure 1).

  Such a landscape is called an adaptive landscape, a concept that originated with the Harvard-trained geneticist Sewall Wright. In the early twentieth century, Wright performed breeding experiments at the US Department of Agriculture that aimed to create superior cows, hogs, and sheep.3 Through these experiments, Wright discovered something fundamental and odd: the Darwinian recipe of selecting the best animals can fail to create a superior breed. And he found out why. To explain his insights to others, he created the concept of an adaptive landscape.

  Figure 1.

  Evolving populations of organisms—sharks that must conserve energy while hunting, bacteria that must disarm deadly antibiotics, or herbivores that need to survive on nutrient-poor leaves—explore solutions to the problems they face more or less blindly. Wright saw that such problem solving amounts to climbing a peak in an adaptive landscape. A Darwinian method to find a best solution would start with any solution, no matter how bad, and tinker with it, preserving only the steps that improved it. Preserving the good and discarding the bad is the essence of both natural selection and its closest human analog—competition among people and their organizations.4 Natural selection is perfectly suited to conquering an adaptive landscape whenever that landscape has a single peak. Always driving uphill, selection will reliably find the highest peak of such a landscape. But in a more complex landscape with two peaks, a dozen peaks, hundreds of peaks, or too many peaks to count, natural selection is more than just imperfect. It can fail disastrously. Evolving organisms that need to get from one peak to the next-higher one—from one solution to a better one—need to traverse the valleys between them, and that’s where natural selection comes up short. Because selection never accepts the worse for the better, it allows not a single downhill step and can therefore get stuck far below Mount Everest. The importance of this problem is hard to overstate. All of evolution’s creative products—a million species and counting—are the end points of journeys through such landscapes. Natural selection is essential for this journey, but in a rugged, multipeaked landscape, it is not sufficient.

  Sewall Wright discovered not only this problem with natural selection, but also one potential solution. It is a force of evolution called genetic drift. To understand what it achieves, consider a human analogy involving professional musicians, artists, or athletes whose performance has plateaued, and no matter how much they practice, they fail to rise above this plateau. Such professionals often need to deconstruct and relearn their most basic techniques. Champion golfer Tiger Woods did exactly that when he reconstructed his golf swing in 1997. He suffered a lackluster 1998 season, but broke new records in the years thereafter. Sometimes things need to get worse before they can get better.

  Genetic drift allows life to do the same thing, and it is at least as important for evolution as natural selection is. An additional and separate mechanism, recombination, enables evolving organisms to make giant leaps through an adaptive landscape and helps them vault over obstacles on their way to the highest peaks. Recombination takes place wherever sex happens, be it the plain vanilla sex humans indulge in or the more bizarre and mysterious forms that enable even bacteria and plants to exchange genes with each other.

  Landscapes have become a fundamental concept in modern science, one whose importance goes far beyond biology. Just as evolving organisms journey through adaptive landscapes, so too do bonding atoms and molecules journey through something called an energy landscape. Energy landscapes can be no less rugged than evolution’s landscapes. Studying them reveals not just how nature creates sparkling diamonds and glittering snowflakes, but also how we can create better molecules to serve us.

  The problems of computer science, whether routing air traffic at busy airports or playing the game Go, also have multiple solutions, which form what is known as a solution landscape. And computers can solve complex problems with the same methods that enabled life to evolve. Even more important, these methods can help computers produce creative works, including patentable electronic circuits and musical compositions that rival human compositions.

  But even more intriguing than artificial intelligences are the problem solvers most familiar to us. These are our own minds, which navigate a mental landscape of possibilities with Darwinian processes similar to those that life, molecules, and algorithms use to explore their landscapes. Some of these creative journeys, like those of the painters Raphael and Paul Gauguin, take creators through different countries and continents, but many other journeys explore an inner realm. Among them is the journey described in 1891 by physicist and physician Hermann von Helmholtz about some problems he had solved in the theoretical physics of liquids:

  I had only succeeded in solving such problems after many devious ways… and by a series of fortunate guesses. I have to compare myself with an Alpine climber, who, not knowing the way, ascends slowly and with toil, and is often compelled to retrace his steps because his progress stopped; sometimes by reasoning, and sometimes by accident, he hits upon traces of a fresh path, which again leads him a little further; and finally, when he has reached the goal, he finds to his annoyance a royal road on which he might have ridden up if he had been clever enough to find the right starting-point at the outset.5

  And so here we see, some thirty years before Wright published his work, Wright’s own theory foreshadowed and applied to the human mind. Indeed, because our minds create using mechanisms not quite identical but similar to drift and recombination, applying the lessons of biological evolution—what I call landscape thinking—can help us make our individual and collective minds work better. Landscape thinking can help us improve how we think, how we raise our children, and how we enhance innovation with the right schools and universities, business policies, and governmental regulations. But landscape thinking is also about more than maximizing innovation, productivity, or economic output. It shows us how creativity comes from a single source: the ability to
explore vast and complex landscapes, a principle so fundamental that it applies wherever the new, the useful, and the beautiful originate. Like all good science, then, it shows us something profound about ourselves and our world.

  Chapter 1

  The Cartography of Evolution

  It was spring of 1915 when the German army first unleashed weaponized chlorine gas on Allied soldiers in World War I. That’s when John Burdon Sanderson Haldane saved thousands of Allied lives by inhaling chlorine gas himself. J.B.S., as he was known, was a twenty-three-year-old officer who had trained in mathematics and the classics at Oxford University and was serving on the front lines in France when the gas attacks began. Unfortunately, the British army had issued ninety thousand useless gas masks to its troops. Together with his father, a physiologist at Oxford, J.B.S. was charged with developing more effective gas masks. They built themselves a small gas chamber, in which they breathed chlorine gas with and without gas masks until their lungs became “duly irritable.”1

  Self-experiments like this had a long tradition in the Haldane family. Haldane’s father, who also inspected mines for the British government, had taught the young J.B.S. the effects of methane gas by letting him read Shakespeare aloud in a contaminated mine until he fainted. Later on, as a fellow at Oxford, Haldane manipulated his blood’s acidity by consuming hydrochloric acid and other toxic chemicals in experiments that left him in serious pain, or with violent diarrhea, or panting for several days.2

  But Haldane was much more than an oddball scientist with a penchant for self-experimentation. He was arguably the greatest polymath of his generation. A precocious child who learned to read before age three, Haldane was as well versed in the classics as he was in science and was described by a contemporary as possibly “the last man who might know all there was to be known.”3 In the sciences, he made discoveries in fields ranging from physiology and statistics to genetics, evolution, and biochemistry. Curiously, like other eminent creators we will encounter later, he was a bit myopic—not to say blind—when judging which of his breakthroughs was the most important. He thought it was a discovery about cytochrome oxidase—an enzyme important for respiration—but history issued a different verdict.4