Sleeping Beauties
The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture
Andreas Wagner
There are all kinds of successful life forms – animals, plants, even genes – whose success was delayed for millions of years. The first ants, for example, go back 140 million years, but ants did not begin to branch into today’s more than 11,000 species until forty million years later. Mammals with various lifestyles – ground-dwelling, tree-climbing, flying or swimming – originated more than 100 million years before they became successful. And a family of saltwater clams had to wait for 350 million years before it became well enough established to diversify into the many species that thrive today.
These life forms are the sleeping beauties of biological evolution. They cast in doubt truths about success and failure that we hold dear. And they lead us to question the role that the quality of a new life form – or of any other innovation – plays in its success.
In Sleeping Beauties, evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner explores findings about evolution that molecular biology has recently revealed, and applies them to understanding how biological evolution creates new solutions to life’s problems. New work in the biological sciences – some of it no more than a decade old – is turning much of what we think is fundamental to evolutionary innovation on its head. By exploring a four-billion-year-long record of innovation in biological evolution, Wagner discovers the often-surprising rules that govern which innovations succeed and which fail.
Published by Oneworld Publications
Praise for Sleeping Beauties
Hopeful and fascinating. – The Times
Sleeping Beauties is a delightful, accessible and information-packed primer on evolutionary biology, taking the reader from the complex details of DNA and proteins to some of humanity’s most intriguing successes and failures. Andreas Wagner explains the emergence of many otherwise puzzling traits and species—and also sheds important new light on the mechanics of evolution itself. – Wall Street Journal
A fascinating argument, told in an engaging and clear style, that reminds us just how creative evolution can be. – New Scientist
Wagner offers a provocative new picture of how context underlies the success of nature’s best inventions, across the tree of life and in society… poetic… Sleeping Beauties is a book of many triumphs. But the most useful of its many messages may be how Wagner equips the reader with a grammar for describing the sleeping beauties in our own lives. – Nature
What Darwin didn’t say, and Andreas Wagner, a professor of evolutionary biology at the University of Zurich, tells us, is that it can take a long time – millions of years – before a mutation actually becomes relevant to the survival of the organism… Perhaps the book’s most important message is that the idea of a singular genius creating world-changing inventions out of nothing is a false one. – Irish Times
[An] excellent study… The accessible prose ensures even excursions into molecular biology are comprehensible, and Wagner finds surprising depth in evolutionary history… This is the rare volume that general readers will enjoy as much as specialists. – Publishers Weekly, starred review
Accessible and compelling… [Sleeping Beauties is] a fascinating perspective on dormancy’s abundant and critical role in evolutionary innovation. – Booklist
