So let us perform an experiment on the data available on the history of innovation. Take roughly two hundred of the most important innovations and scientific breakthroughs from the past six hundred years, starting with Gutenberg’s press: everything from Einstein’s theory of relativity to the invention of air conditioning to the birth of the World

Gregory Bateson in Mind and Nature.

an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.

There is a prediction (albeit retroactive) lurking in this idea of the liquid network, as well as in the premise that innovative environments share signature patterns at different scales. The prediction is that whenever human beings first organized themselves into settlements that resembled liquid networks, a great flowering of innovation would

There are many ways to measure innovation, but perhaps the most elemental yardstick, at least where technology is concerned, revolves around the job that the technology in question lets you do. All other things being equal, a breakthrough that lets you execute two jobs that were impossible before is twice as innovative as a breakthrough that lets

The evolutionary theorist François Jacob captured this in his concept of evolution as a “tinkerer,” not an engineer; our bodies are also works of bricolage, old parts strung together to form something radically

Scientists and animal lovers had long observed that as life gets bigger, it slows down. Flies live for hours or days; elephants live for half-centuries. The hearts of birds and small mammals pump blood much faster than those of giraffes and blue whales. But the relationship between size and speed didn’t seem to be a linear one.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention. New York: HarperPerennial, 1997. ―――. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.

exaptation. An organism develops a trait optimized for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.