The strange and beautiful truth about the adjacent possible is that its boundaries grow as you explore those boundaries. Each new combination ushers new combinations into the adjacent possible.

Darwin, Charles. Voyage of the Beagle. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2002.

But modern scientific paradigms are rarely overthrown. Instead, they are built upon. They create a platform that supports new paradigms above them. Darwin’s theory of natural selection was a “dangerous” idea—in Daniel Dennett’s phrase—because it challenged Biblical and human-centric accounts of life’s history, but the true measure of its scientific

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

When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing.

The field that ultimately explained Darwin’s Paradox—ecosystems ecology—stands on the shoulders of population genetics, systems theory, and biochemistry, among others.

Hall, Doug. “Fail Fast, Fail Cheap.” BusinessWeek (June 25, 2007). http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/​content/07_26/b4040436.htm_.

evolution has, in a sense, “tuned” the error rate to the optimal balance between too much mutation and too much stability.

take longer to use up their quota.