Andreas Wagner > Quotes

“Only theory can turn a heap of facts into a tower of knowledge”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“The power of natural selection is beyond dispute, but this power has limits. Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. And calling the change that creates them random is just another way of admitting our ignorance about it.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“change requires destruction, whether or not you value the destroyed.”
― Andreas Wagner, Paradoxical Life

“Innovation is combinatorial. It combines old things to make the new.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“If we stopped arguing for one true view and conceded that we had a choice in this matter, we might gain the ability to choose flexibly. We could then more easily choose perspectives that allow us to solve problems we humans care about, problems that require delicate decisions, such as how to best distribute resources in a country, how to provide for and educate a population, and how to improve its intelligence.”
― Andreas Wagner, Paradoxical Life

“The hypothetical RNA replicase would be a self-replicating molecule, while the citric acid cycle is an autocatalytic network of chemical reactions. This isn’t a shortcoming of the citric acid cycle, but another hint that a defining feature of life may not require RNA replicators and their genetic information: Life can exist before genes.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“Enviromental change requires complexity, which begets robustness, which begets genotype networks, which enable innovations, the very kind that allow life to cope with enviromental change, increase its complexity, and so on, in an ascending spiral of ever-increasing innovability.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“The evolutionary algorithms that mimic biological evolution are powerful tools, but they’re still missing something. They are still deficient in the recombination department so central to biological innovations.31 Nature is better at recombination, much better, for one simple reason: standards.”
― Andreas Wagner, The Arrival of the Fittest

“This is one of nature's lessons for innovable technologies: If we want to open nature's black box of innovation, Ockham's razor is much too dull. Like oil and water, simplicity and innovability don't mix.”
― Andreas Wagner