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.

Ray Oldenburg’s The Great Good Place.

take longer to use up their quota.

Wright, Robert. NonZero: The Logic of Human Destiny. New York: Pantheon Books, 2000.

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.

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.

The diversity of the Twitter platform is no accident. It derives from a deliberate strategy that Dorsey, Williams, and Stone embraced from the outset: they built an emergent platform first, and then they built Twitter.com. An open platform in software is often called an API, which stands for application programming interface. An API is a kind of li

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

The history of life and human culture, then, can be told as the story of a gradual but relentless probing of the adjacent possible, each new innovation opening up new paths to explore.