Where Good Ideas Come From

Reproducing asexually makes perfect sense during prosperous periods: if life is good, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t mess with success by introducing new genetic combinations. But when the world gets more challenging—scarce resources, predators, parasites—you need to innovate. And the quickest path to innovation lies in making novel connection

when the environment grows more hostile, the pressure to innovate—to stumble across some new way of eking out a living in a resource-poor setting—shifts the balance of risk versus reward involved in mutation.

You begin in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room that you haven’t visited yet. Those four rooms are the adjacent possible. But once you open one of those doors and stroll into that room, three new doors appear, each leading to a brand-new room that you couldn’t have reached from your original starting point. Keep opening new doors an

Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature.

Darwin’s words here oscillate between two structuring metaphors that govern all his work: the complex interdependencies of the tangled bank, and the war of nature; the symbiotic connections of an ecosystem and the survival of the fittest.

innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts—mechanical or conceptual—and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts. Environments that block or limit those new combinations—by punishing experimentation, by obscuring certain bran

Kauffman’s theory of the adjacent possible is outlined in his book Investigations.

Johnson, George. “Of Mice and Elephants: A Matter of Scale.” New York Times, January 12, 1999.

A feather adapted for warmth is now exapted for flight.