Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity

by Andreas Wagner

How the principles of biological innovation can help us overcome creative challenges in art, business, and science
In Life Finds a Way, biologist Andreas Wagner reveals the deep symmetry between innovation in biological evolution and human cultural creativity. Rarely is either a linear climb to perfection--instead, "progress" is typically marked by a sequence of peaks, plateaus, and pitfalls. For instance, in Picasso's forty-some iterations of Guernica, we see the same combination of small steps, incessant reshuffling, and large, almost reckless, leaps that characterize the way evolution transformed a dinosaur's grasping claw into a condor's soaring wing. By understanding these principles, we can also better realize our own creative potential to find new solutions to adversity.
Ultimately, Life Finds a Way offers a new framework for the nature of creativity, enabling us to better adapt, grow, and change in art, business, or science--that is, in life.

Genres: Science, Nonfiction, Evolution, Biology, Psychology, Nature, Stem

Audible Audio

Published June 25, 2019

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author with this name on GR

Andreas Wagner is Professor in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Zurich and an award-winning science writer. He received his PhD from Yale and has held research positions at the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin and the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The author of more than 150 scientific papers published in leading journals including Nature and Science, this is his first book popularizing his new evolutionary systems research. He lives in Zurich.

Reviews

[Kelsey May · Rating 5 out of 5]

This year, I’ve been diving into nonfiction and science books more than ever, thanks, in part, to my husband’s interest in reading about animals and trees, which hooked me. So when I walked past a display of science books at Grand Rapids Public Library, I couldn’t help but snag one. Dr. Andreas Wagner’s "Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity" has a stunning cover — a mosaic of brilliantly-colored moths. I sat down in a chair and was engulfed in the profund insights Dr. Wagner offers. If you don’t get any farther than this first paragraph, let me say that I highly recommend reading this book.

At first, I thought this book was a “how-to” book — how to be creative, how to tap into creativity, how to use ideas from evolution to be more creatively productive. Instead, this book delves into how everything living has evolved in a time-old ballet of creativity, innovation, and trial-and-error. I learned so much about biology, genetics, atoms, and how our minds work, and I finished the entire book (over 200 pages of heavily scientific text) in five days.

Dr. Wagner does a fantastic job of explaining complicated scholarly ideas, and in the last section, he applies the principles and thinking he’s detailed to education, immigration, technological advancement, and play, asserting that, more or less, we’re doing it all wrong. Rather than rewarding competition, conformity, and practicality, Dr. Wagner insists that we’ll be a more innovative, kinder world by encouraging mistakes, collaboration, and geographic mobility. His well-argued ideas remind me of Ms. Frizzle’s wise adage: “Take chances, make mistakes, and get messy!”

Full review at: https://hyypeonline.com/2019/09/04/li...

[Peter Tillman · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I have some notes. If I come across them, I'll post a bit (Found: see below). For now: this one has been gathering dust pretty much since I brought it home from the library. Overdue now. Second try?

@ p 63 of 222, pretty dry, nor am I learning much, except that there are (literally) astronomical possibilities for recombinations of even a fruit-fly genome. I think I'll start skimming.
Never did, or at least the bookmark is gone. Packing books to go back to the library in a bit, so likely done forever. Caveat lector!

[Sara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I was so looking forward to this book, but I found it pretty... eh.

For an evolution book, there were extremely few examples of ... evolution or even genes. You hope to read about animals, but instead you're treated to analogies of convoluted computer models. It's a good analogy, but seemed better suited to a long essay or article rather than an entire book. One of its more interesting points was in mentioning how genetic drift can have a stronger effect on populations of mammals compared to natural selection. It helped explain how large scale changes can occur despite the fact that natural selection usually occurs rather slowly by introducing chance genetic diversity.

I liked the end on the role of creativity in the brain, but I thought it was a loose tie-in with evolution and it was ground that has been tread on before in other books.

I love evolution, but this was definitely one of the driest books on the subject I've read. I guess I would recommend this if you enjoy the more 'math oriented' aspects of evolution. I believe that's this author's niche.

[Daniel Hulter · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a wonderful book! Andreas Wagner takes us though numerous insights about the fundamental laws of creativity and innovation. I have already begun re-reading and will continue exploring the concepts Wagner has beautifully illustrated and their profound implications further.

[William Bies · Rating 1 out of 5]

This reviewer recalls a passage from Alexander Baumgarten’s eighteenth-century classic and foundational Aesthetica, which did so much to foster the growth of the nascent discipline of aesthetics, to the effect that an author ought not to attempt a work in a genre beyond his powers, in that the results are bound to appear ridiculous. Baumgarten has in mind, say, that a poet who excels at composing lyrical ballads would be unlikely to meet with much success if he were to try his hand at writing an epic. The evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner fails to heed Baumgarten’s sage advice in the popular book to be reviewed here, Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches us about Creativity. Now, as we have reviewed elsewhere, Wagner is a competent and even pioneering scientist and has described his original research in a form palatable to the ordinary educated reader in his Arrival of the Fittest: How Nature Innovates. Based on the promise shown there, one could conceive hopes to find the present volume engaging, or at least worth the read. But it disappoints; Wagner’s reach exceeds his grasp.

The first half of the book is devoted to a popular exposition of Wagner’s views on evolutionary biology, and on the mechanics of how adaptation works, conceived of in population-genetic terms as an optimization of an objective function (‘fitness’) in the multidimensional space of possible designs of an organism [Baupläne]. Now, the problem thus posed is by no means easy to understand, even for experts. Our mathematical intuition, coming largely from low-dimensional systems, does not serve us very well in the setting of very many dimensions. Here is where Wagner has made his mark as a professional scientist. He gives a good popular discussion of his original contributions to evolutionary biology in Arrival of the Fittest (see this reviewer’s review elsewhere). The interested reader could profit from consulting this reference, which seems to provide a more coherent and connected overview of Wagner’s ideas than contained in the first half of the present work.

The author’s stylistic faults become more evident in the second half of the book, where he takes up his proper theme, the problem of creativity and what his perspective as an evolutionary biologist can contribute to an understanding of it. The premise of the book is indeed intriguing, but Wagner’s execution falters and can in no sense be termed masterful. There is no overarching coherence, no keen or incisive conceptual analysis, no penetrating perspective on psychology per se. Wagner proceeds along a meandering path, citing a potpourri of studies in the literature on education at random, adduces no original ideas, and appears to be trapped in the concept of Darwinian natural selection as his idée fixe that supposedly solves everything. One is reminded of the proverb: if you have a hammer, all problems look like nails.

To illustrate these shortcomings, let us take a look at how Wagner approaches his book’s central concern [Anliegen], the problem of creativity. Prima facie, it is by no means evident that innovative thinking involves a process of Darwinian natural selection. If anything, one would be disposed to suspect that the process is more Lamarckian in character, in that the inventor will freely choose preferentially to retain advantageous acquired characters when moving to the next cycle of design, rather than abandon them and entrust his success to random factors. True, as Wagner points out, it won’t always work to insist on keeping every advantage in every new generation; known as greedy search, such a strategy is prone to getting stuck in undesirable local optima of the fitness function (assuming that invention can usefully be described as an optimization of some objective function in the space of possible designs, which can very well be contested; see below). But, by and large, the reproduction of the inventor’s idea at each stage in design is not beholden to the constraint nature has to work with, that (aside from epigenetic marking, which could be important some of the time) there is no way to transfer an acquired character directly back into the genetic code. Differential reproductive success will accomplish this indirectly over sufficiently many generations, in a population large enough not to be dominated by noise (a.k.a. neutral drift). But if the inventor’s search for the optimal design were thus constrained, one would expect the process of invention to be far more unwieldly than it actually is. Second, even if we grant the mechanism of natural selection to play a role, there is no reason that in, a design process superintended by a conscious agent, the variations from one generation to the next must be blind, or undirected in the sense of neo-Darwinism. When modern evolutionary biologists speak of mutations as being ‘random’, they mean this term in the technical sense that they are presumably uncorrelated with the adaptive needs of the organism. From what we know about mutagenesis, this does seem to be what one would expect in natural reproduction of DNA: cosmic rays, oxidative stress, thermal noise etc. have no reason to know about what change in the genetic code would be beneficial to the organism. The situation is entirely different when an inventor is inventing. Far from proceeding blindly, he makes use of domain expertise and informed intuition to guide his decisions about how to modify the design. Thus, ordinarily the process of generating variations is not blind, but directed. Once in a while, one may wish to throw in a random element (as one does in simulated annealing), but it would be a travesty to characterize the inventive process as nothing but this, as Wagner implies. Hence, his understanding of human invention is much too simplistic and dictated mainly by enthusiasm over the apparent striking success of Darwinian explanations in evolutionary biology, to which he has made no little contribution. A good paradigm in one field need not apply to just anything else one might imagine it to.

But in a deeper sense, Wagner’s exposition is sorely wanting because it fails to set the process of invention into the wider context of the psychology of the mind. There is by now a considerable literature by psychologists who specialize in the study of creativity, of which Wagner takes no note at all. This reviewer cannot pretend to competence in the area of psychology, but he has seen enough of the literature to be aware of some of the issues and to miss them in Wagner’s breezy account. A psychologist at the University of British Columbia who specializes in research into creativity, Liane Gabora, has published some useful reviews in the quantitative biology section of the preprint archive that will serve as an entryway into the literature, as well as installments of her own original research. Unlike Wagner, who contents himself with armchair speculation and has not, apparently, even bothered to read the psychological literature, she backs up her original ideas with a combination of old-school case studies on subjects, whom she recruits for the purpose, and numerical simulations of toy models meant to encompass the process of discovery.

As Gabora along with her colleague Michael Unrau review, for instance, in their preprint arXiv: 1812.02870 [q-bio.NC], by no means have psychologists going back to G. Wallas’ pioneering study in 1926 relied exclusively, or even primarily, on a picture of creative ideation as a process of Darwinian natural selection. It first tended to be thought of as an heuristic search, involving breaking the task down into subtasks and strategies for evaluating proposed partial solutions and putting them together again to reach the final optimal design. Another common approach is dual process theory, which divides the problem into divergent followed by convergent stages: generate and explore. The Darwinian theory constitutes only one among the suite of dual process theories, and not the most promising at that. Essentially, in order to cast the problem as one of differential reproduction, one has to set out a space of possible solutions in which the blind variation and natural selection can operate. But patently this is tantamount to already having solved the bulk of the problem! Gabora calls her own preferred approach to creative problem solving a honing theory; it comes down to a self-organizing process in which the person progressively refines his worldview by generating novelty in aspects of it perceived to be problematic, where improvement may be anticipated, then seeking to integrate the new perspective with the rest of his thinking (which might provoke further restructuring). For her, it is a matter of realizing the mind’s inherent potential, not of enumerating and evaluating a number of candidates that will be conceptually well-formed from the start.

Sometimes, it seems to this reviewer that she may be going off the deep end, as when she resorts to the mathematics of Hilbert space from quantum theory as a model of the linguistic representation of concepts in human cognition, but even there, her guiding intuitions may well be sound and discerning and merely the mathematical framework she takes over from quantum physics a little inadequate for the linguistic setting in which she applies it. Her point is that, initially, what the inventor starts off with is a vaguely defined superposition of ideas, which gradually becomes clearer over the course of the stages of discovery. The path to the final result is not necessarily linear and merely subtractive (whittling down an ensemble until one is left with only one element of it). There can be non-trivial cross-correlations among different aspects of the problem, in much the same way as, in quantum physics, Bell’s inequality implies contextuality and non-classical correlations in the statistical ensemble represented by the wavefunction.

We need not subscribe to all of Gabora’s theories to recognize that she, at least, is brainstorming and seeking a novel conceptual framework with which to understand the psychology of creativity, rather than satisfying herself with serving up untested trivialities laced with questionable embedded assumptions, as Wagner does. Cut out the fat, and the second half of the present work by Wagner under review here could be compressed into a single sentence: phylogenesis is nothing but simulated annealing in the fitness landscape and, likewise, creative thought is nothing but simulated annealing in the space of possible designs, problem solutions or inventive concepts. If we are to make progress, we will need more than a simplistic statement such as this, a lot more. The curious reader may wish to refer to the classic essay by Jacques Hadamard, entitled The Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field: How Creativity is Tapped in Science, the Unconscious Mind and Discovery, Intuition versus Verbal Reasoning, Poincaré’s Forgetting Hypothesis, Creative Techniques of Einstein, Pascal, Wiener and Others. As one can tell from the lengthy descriptive title, Hadamard offers a wealth of ideas pertinent to the problem of creativity, which psychologists along the lines of Gabora and her collaborators are venturing to explore (Hadamard is himself an accomplished mathematician, which circumstance may explain how he can furnish his speculations with empirical content, what the author of the present work neglects altogether to do). Andreas Wagner evinces no competence whatsoever in the field of the psychology of creativity and fails to convey a plausible answer to the question implicit in the title of his book, or what can we learn about creativity from evolutionary biology? Nothing, it would seem, were one to follow Wagner himself. Yet the question itself is a valid one and calls for a more adequate response.

[Stephanie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was attracted to this book because I thought it was going to be able evolution and how different species creatively evolve. Boy, was I wrong.

Instead, what Wagner does here is use different topics of population genetics to support how we creatively think and succeed as a human race. He does throw in examples of different life forms and how they have coped with different "weapons" - i.e. bacteria. In the first half of the book, he is introducing topics, such as genetic landscape, drift, natural selection, etc. Honestly, I think his descriptions would have been helpful when I was taking Population Genetics in College, but I digress..

It took me awhile to get through the majority of the book because even though I am familiar with genetics, it's been awhile and the concepts aren't always easy for me to grasp. Some readers may find this material too heavy for them. I found the last two chapters absolutely engaging! There was so much information here - the value of being absentminded and how we can restructure our institutions to benefit creative thinking.

Valuable read!

[Coelho Pré-Cambriano · Rating 4 out of 5]

É um livro muito interessante, sobretudo os primeiros 5 capítulos, que lidam mais propriamente com paisagens adaptativas em um contexto biológico e, portanto, evolutivo.

A analogia da paisagem adaptativa é muito eficiente em demonstrar como o Darwinismo estrito (isto é, selecionista demais) falha miseravelmente enquanto explicação da criação da complexidade.

A marcha cega da seleção, sempre pra cima, impede que ela explore outros picos (soluções melhores, outros graus de complexidade) e, assim, se nos atermos somente a seleção, estaremos fadados ao fracasso, se quisermos explicar a complexidade e a origem das inovações.

Trazendo a deriva genética pra essa analogia, o autor mostra com clareza como um processo aleatório, que aos olhos de muitos pode ser inútil, na verdade é fundamental, uma vez que a deriva não está limitada como a seleção. Ela pode "descer" ou tomar outras rotas em uma paisagem. Assim, ela permite cruzar vales e encontrar melhores soluções (ou construções biológicas mais complexas).

É muito interessante também quanto vemos as semelhanças entre paisagens adaptativas biológicas e as paisagens energéticas que explica a forma de moléculas e flocos de neve. O calor desempenha nas paisagens energéticas mais ou menos o papel da deriva, permitindo explorar a paisagem, se limitar a sempre estar escolhendo o melhor.

Os algoritmos genéticos são uma bela demonstração do poder dessa visão mais plural. São capazes de encontrar soluções para problemas complexos por meio de um processo que simula a evolução biológica: tanto seleção quanto deriva possuem seus análogos. Sem deixar de lado a recombinação, claro. É maravilhoso que esses algoritmos consigam encontrar ótimas soluções permitindo que... erros aconteçam! Os erros permitem explorar e, portanto, encontrar outras soluções, não ficar preso num ótimo local.

Enfim, há uma série de coisas mais voltadas pra biologia que eu poderia comentar. A questão do teleporte em paisagens adaptativas, as pontes entre picos, etc. Mas vou me contentar com o que já expus aqui.

Os capítulos que lidam com a criatividade humana não me agradaram muito, mas definitivamente não são ruins. Pelo contrário, recomendo a leitura, se você se interessa a respeito da criatividade humana. É importante saber como não matá-la (e.g., não aderir a sistemas de governo autoritários e que buscam homogeneização do pensamento, tanto de direita quando de esquerda) e, mais importante, como estimulá-la!

Vale a leitura!

[Jacob C · Rating 5 out of 5]

Presents a conceptual framework to unify ideas of creativity across evolution, art, chemistry, business, and any other area presenting complex problems.

[Bilal · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a book about the strategies observed in nature to find optimum solutions to problems in high-dimensional spaces. For readers with background in optimization – mathematics, computer science, engineering – the discussion will be easy to understand; and I suspect those without any background in optimization may struggle to visualize the n-dimensional “landscape” that the author refers to frequently.

Andreas starts off with the discussion about how life finds optimum solutions to challenges faced in their particular environments, noting that while natural selection will always aim to find a locally optimal solution, it is the drift in the genotype that allows exploration of the greater n-dimensional landscape to potentially find better opima or even the global optimum. The discussion is enlightening. He carries over the discussion to how complex optimization problems are solved in nature outside of life, specifically in molecular structures, and he informs us that, for example, the carbon Bucky ball structure results when carbon atoms are excited to very high-temperatures and then cooled slowly, allowing them to settle in a state that is more optimal. He makes similar observations in how snowflakes are formed. Then he turns his attention to how our brains solve complex problems, and observes the same pattern, which, in this case, is referred to as divergent thinking followed by convergent thinking, etc. Fascinating parallels!

Andreas concludes the book with a discussion of how education should be approached to allow creativity to prosper. He observes that the Western education system has served that purpose better than, for example, the Chinese or the Japanese education systems, but that the Western education system has been deteriorating also in this respect. He also talks about the impact on creativity of how different societies look at failure.

This is a thought-provoking book, and it is beautifully composed and presented. At the conclusion of it, I was left with two questions: One, while for some problems the goal of the optimization process is easy to comprehend, not so for others; in the case of a painting, for example, how does our mind decide that this outcome is more optimal than that? Second, while incubating creativity is certainly a desirable goal, there certainly is also the need to incubate discipline: Someone has to build and maintain infrastructures, organize information, keep the peace, etc.

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

What starts as a book about the adaptive landscape in population genetics -- that is, how natural selection pushes species toward success, ignoring that the path to the optimal solution may not be a straight ascent, and how nature adjusts for this -- takes a bit of a turn somewhere around the middle as the author attempts to apply lessons from this to other areas, including human creativity and innovation. It's an intriguing framework, although the book feels oddly weighted in terms of the attention given to different topics and some parts are more convincing than others. Many of the takeaways from the second half of the book feel slight or too obvious. An enjoyable read overall, although I'm not sure it hangs together entirely convincingly.

[The Inquisitive Biologist · Rating 5 out of 5]

How does evolution move through adaptive landscapes? And are there parallels with human inventiveness? Wagner returns with another insanely fascinating book combining cutting-edge computational biology with daring lateral thinking. See my full review at https://inquisitivebiologist.com/2019...

[Katra · Rating 3 out of 5]

I almost gave up on this halfway through but was rewarded at the end. There's quite a bit about evolution, crystal structures, etc but keep going. It all ends up being highly applicable to human creativity.

[Matt · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars = a fine book. Explains well what it sets out to do.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

I haven't had so much fun reading a science book in a loooong time. Andreas Wagner explores three different topics, all dealing with reaching the best solution in a complex landscape: evolution, molecular bonds and creativity. And it's impressive how well he linked them in this book.

We've all heard about 'survival of the fittest', but in reality evolution is usually 'survival of the good enough'. Wagner points out that if we consider biological designs (and here I don't mean anything religious, just the biochemical and physico-chemical properties of living organisms) as a complex mountainous landscape, we can immediately realize there are a lot of smaller peaks surrounding, or needing to be traversed in order to reach that highest peak. The problem is that evolution is a one-way engine: up you go, or your genes perish. But how can species avoid getting stuck on a molehill and advance toward a higher peak? Here it's important to keep in mind that the genetic landscape is not really a 3-D space. It's a multi-dimensional space, where multiple factors influence fitness in a given environment. And this multi-dimensionality actually makes it easier to adapt (although it makes it harder for our brains to visualize such an journey). Wagner does offer a great example of how adding one dimension actually makes it easier for cross a valley: in a 2-D space the only way through a valley is to sink all the way to the bottom. In 3-D, you may be able to go around the rim of the valley without needing to descend (or severely compromise your fitness). How do we achieve the tools to traverse this landscape? Wagner offers two well studied mechanisms: genetic drift and sex/gene recombination.

He then proceeds to talk about complex molecules and how atoms bind together to achieve the lowest energy state (for molecules, best 'fitness' is actually defined by energetic valleys - the least energy, the more stable the molecule is). In chemistry too molecules can get stuck in an intermediary 'good-enough' state. The only way out is through thermal agitation - a.k.a. heat.

And now we're ready to discuss creativity. Because genetic drift, heat and recombination can be equated to mechanisms that increase human creativity and aid problem solving. Wagner is not the first and he won't be the last to deplore our increased reliance on standardized test and scores to select 'value'. And he brings great arguments for why a rigid, homogenized evaluation and teaching curricula decreases innovation and cripples problem solving. In an inpatient society, educational system and academia there is little room for failure, yet failure is necessary. Failure and inferior ideas become stepping stones for better ideas, and second chances become vital. Yet we discourage creativity in favor of 'do more of what already works' despite knowing that it negatively impacts our society. The author even goes so far as equating the SAT style of exams with an engine that can only go uphill - and worse yet, can only go up the same hill! And "When everybody scrambles up the same hill, a landscape of knowledge remains unexplored.

So what can we do to foster creativity? The author doesn't suggest we need to stop teaching students information - after all, as Pasteur said, "Chance favors the prepared mind." And competition is definitely beneficial, although not the end all be all. What he recommends is more patience in the educational space, more time to play (for children and adults) and more safety nets in those areas where creativity is highly needed (for e.g. the implementation of safe funding for researchers which won't be taken away if the first endeavor fails; that way they can focus on innovating and not securing funding for non-risky projects which innovate less). He also argues in favor of trans-disciplinary and trans-cultural collaborations (as you might expect, there is a direct correlation between innovation and immigration).

One topic the author discussed was very dear to my mind: that of incubation. We've all noticed that taking time away from a trying to solve a problem improves our ability to come up with solutions. Here vacation time, performing easy tasks, and engaging in creative activities can help. I was surprised how many examples were given of big Nobel prize winners who argued for allowing researchers to engage in artistic endeavors. E.g., Cajal argued in favor of choosing students "with an abundance of restless imagination, [who] spend their energy in the pursuit of literature, art, philosophy and the recreations of mind and body. To him who observes them from afar, it appears as though they are scattering and dissipating their energies, while in reality, they are channeling and strengthening them."

Ultimately, the book argues in favor of slowing down and taking more time to travel, especially for those domains dependent on innovation. Because, as Albert Szent-Gyorghyi of Vitamin C fame said: "Discovery consists of looking at the same things as everyone else and seeing something different."

[Clayton Ellis · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a 2.5 for me. I thought this book would be completely about creativity and how evolution may have transpired to allow it to be more so. I got some of that in the last third. The book was fine, just not what I thought it would be. Took me a while to get through it too. I did not feel compelled to finish it, and getting through it felt more like a chore than enjoyment.

[Lisa Houlihan]

The first half of the book is science-y, genes and alleles and chromosomes, and I struggled. The second half is more psychology and sociology, about competition and creativity and Great Leaps Forward. I could follow the second half but not necessarily its connection to the first, but I admit I wasn't trying.

[Janet · Rating 1 out of 5]

Rather dull and didn't make much of a case for his central thesis. I'm not sure who the audience for this book is supposed to be. Has lots of detailed explanation about some things, but makes vague generalizations on lots of other issues that seem pretty important to me. Might have made a good essay as a thought experiment, but the stretch into book length seemed untenable to me.

[Emin Orhan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Squishy, extremely non-rigorous, uncritical application of a metaphor (landscapes, mountains, hills and all that) to a random assortment of subjects. -100 points for so credulously and uncritically passing on a whole load of non-reproducible, possibly fraudulent, junk science. Another -100 points for peddling the racist stereotype that East Asians lack creativity based on said junk science.

[Lori Kuchenbeisser · Rating 3 out of 5]

I like how someone took Michael Crichton's quote from "Jurrasic Park" and wrote about it. Now to see if Crichton is mentioned in the book.

[Alejandro Peláez · Rating 4 out of 5]

7

[Michiel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fitness landscapes and their application in evolution and innovation. Also discusses how these ideas fit in creativity, education, research and entrepreneurship.

[Ian Lea · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's OK but I didn't really get on with it. Not sure why.

[Calvin Fitzgerald · Rating 5 out of 5]

I think this is a profound book that explains the importance of creativity both in how it naturally and also how we can harness it's power. Overall and excellent book.

[Yanick Punter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some people seem to think that intelligence, or g, is sufficient for creativity. A book like Wired to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind states that people light in schizotypy are more creative. If you look there's plenty of articles stating this and "creativity and madness" is a common trope. Anyway.

The book mentions that the military found differences in creative pilots and intelligent pilots. I think this is important. I speculate it has something to do with networks, with a clear difference and trade-off between intelligent and creative networks.