Success in nature and in culture depends as much on timing as on intelligence
Translated by: Sarah Habib
Grass, mammals, penicillin, John Keats; None of these examples were immediately successful.
The grasses lived barely in patches here and there for about 45 million years before spreading, fairly quickly, almost in a quilt pattern across the continents. Mammals, as we know them, were fuzzy, furry things that lived underground and underfoot for more than 100 million years before rising to positions of prominence and then dominance. The life-saving drug penicillin was abandoned by its discoverer, and remained mostly neglected for more than a decade before it was given to any patient. As for the romantic poet venerated today, John Keats, he sold only a few hundred volumes of poetry during his lifetime, and did not enter the sanctuary until decades after his death.
In fact, many ongoing innovations, whether biological or cultural, did not achieve overnight success. Rather, she emerged and managed to persist, in secret, until the time was right for her to step into the spotlight.
This is what biologist Andreas Wagner says in his new book Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture (2023). Wagner is a professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He came to biology not as a boy fascinated by newts or lichens, but as a teenager fascinated by the prospect of uncovering the principles that guide the natural world. In the laboratory, Wagner created models of genetic networks. In the author’s chair, he explored the puzzling natures of innovation and creativity.
According to him, Wagner originally came up with the concept for “Sleeping Beauties” from conversations he had with artists and scientists, many of whom were frustrated because they had not achieved success. “I think every scientist has ever written a paper that he or she thought would shake the world,” Wagner says. “Then when the research is published, no one pays attention. So there are two readings of this. One: The research is bad and not important. Or: It is waiting to be discovered.” In the laboratory, Wagner and his colleagues found evidence of these “latent innovations” appearing in the DNA of living organisms. So, for his diverse book, he says, “I wanted to bring it all together.”
Recently, I spoke to Wagner about what we can learn from deferred success. In that conversation he was both reserved and open. We delved into the arduous path of life and how we have to think twice about our perceived failures. Who knows? We may be the next John Keats.
What’s wrong with our assumptions about the origins of success?
We have a sense that whenever there is an innovative product – perhaps a new life form, a new type of molecule, a new work of art, or a technological innovation – we think that that product has an internal characteristic that determines its success. But that’s not necessarily true. Something else must be in place – the right world or environment – to make the product successful.
How has the focus on interior features shaped our thinking about the natural world?
I am trained as a geneticist. In genetics, we think of genes as determining—or that the genome determines—the characteristics of an organism. We focus too much on this genetic or “endogenous” explanation; Meaning that something internal to the object determines its success or failure. But an environmental scientist would take a completely different view. He sees the object from an external perspective; That is, from the perspective of how it interacts with the environment. This consists of a mixture of other factors: temperature, solar radiation, availability of water, and other organisms. Thus, the ecologist relies more on this “external” perspective to determine what needs to be present in the environment to make an organism successful.
Can following the ecologists’ way of thinking help us understand what is happening in the world of human innovation?
I talk to a lot of creative people—artists, writers—and what they actually have in common is that they love what they do. But they are often frustrated by their lack of success, and many blame themselves: “It’s just that I’m not good enough. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this job.”
However, this is not necessarily the right way to look at the problem. Because you may have created something “cool,” but it’s not the right place or time for it, and that’s why it didn’t work. I think this thinking can help us, as creative people, feel more compassionate about ourselves; That we are not necessarily to blame if something fails.
You write about the 17th-century Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer, who was unknown for centuries before a 19th-century art critic happened to publish a catalog of his works. How should we think about his fame, which took so long to take off?
In his time, Vermeer was a respected artist among his colleagues, although his output was rather modest; Maybe a few dozen paintings. However, it took two centuries for it to be rediscovered.
One advantage of cultural innovation is that we often have a history of the product. In Vermeer’s case, the record is paintings. In other cases, it may be scientific papers or works of authorship that are preserved for a very, very long time. This preservation is what makes rediscovery possible. However, this conflicts with evolution, because in evolution if an organism wasn’t really successful in the first place and went extinct at some point, that life form or that molecule might need to be reinvented. Therefore, the advantage of cultural creative production is that preservation is better than preservation on the vast time scales of biological evolution.
That’s really interesting. Because, obviously, we have a very solid fossil record, but the idea is that some of the things that we see today – like the caffeine molecule that actually evolved separately in three different plant families – may also have evolved long before that but became extinct before the world existed. Ready for it.
completely. That’s a really good example. Yes, we have a fossil record. But, if you think about it, this fossil record doesn’t usually contain molecules, right? Or it only contains molecules for a fairly short evolutionary time scale, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years at the maximum. But, once we’re talking millions or hundreds of millions of years, all we have is fossilized tissue, mainly rocks. Therefore, all we can infer about past life is what we see from the shape of these fossilized tissues.
In his time, Vermeer was a respected artist among his colleagues, although his output was modest; However, it took two centuries for it to be rediscovered
How does the idea of these “sleeping beauties” surround the principle of convergent evolution; As in the case of the caffeine molecule? How does the world itself shape the innovations that occur in it?
Many inventions or innovations are made many times, and the first few times are somewhat inert; Unrecognized and unsuccessful at the time. This means that the principle of multiple discoveries is actually important in both the natural world and the cultural world.
This idea is closely related to Robert Merton, a sociologist of science. Merton documented many examples of multiple discoveries of the same thing, studied why these discoveries occurred and showed how abundant they were. He said that multiple discoveries in culture and technology are the rule rather than the exception. So, often, if we think of something as having been discovered only once, once we delve deep enough into the historical record, we will discover that it has been discovered many times.
For example, the evolution of eyes has occurred several times in the history of life. Taken together, what it means is that we may be undervaluing nature and culture for this enormous creative potential. In other words, many of the things we think were difficult to come up with have actually been done many times.
“Listen to the world and find out what it wants,” you wrote. I really like that phrase. Do you apply this in your academic or writing practices?
I think everyone does that to some degree. For example, when I and others in my group and in my lab write a paper, we think, “Well, what angle of this data might be interesting to the public or journal editors or other scientists”?
However, this is usually surprisingly unsuccessful! A lot of money in some industries depends on this ability to predict what the world wants. For example, when people invest $100 million in a movie and then it fails. If it were easy, we would do it all the time. However, it turns out that it usually fails.
“The life-saving drug penicillin was abandoned by its discoverer and remained mostly neglected for more than a decade before it was given to any patient.”
Is there another angle to this idea? An approach of trying to be of service to what the world needs at any given point in time, rather than approaching it from a perspective of striving for success?
Most scientists probably don’t look at it that way, I doubt it. Because they’ll say, “I made this discovery that I’m really excited about, and I think it’s important. And now I want to explain to the world why it’s important.”
In some branches of science, especially very applied branches of science, I can see a sense of: “We’re going to try to make things that the world needs and that might actually matter.” The medical field is a really good example of this. But still, let’s say you make a discovery that you think will really shake the world of medicine, but you’re actually struggling—and struggling in vain—to get the medical community to recognize and appreciate its importance.
One example of this is a pacemaker. The first regulator made by the American doctor Albert Hyman was a huge, heavy machine, the size of a sewing machine. Hyman was particularly interested in operating, so to speak, the hearts of stillborn babies. He tried to convince the medical community of the importance of his invention for twenty years without success. It would take another ten or twenty years before other groups came along and invented other versions of this regulator that eventually became successful.
Penicillin was also an important medical discovery, but it did not immediately become the kind of radical global changer that we might think, and even the initial lack of interest in it caused Alexander Fleming to quickly abandon it.
Hassan. History is complicated. First, around Fleming’s time—or even earlier—sulfa drugs were available and had actually been successful in treating infections resulting from the types of injuries soldiers suffered in World War I. So, something was available and it worked. However, it turns out that bacteria are beginning to gain resistance to these types of drugs. Secondly, this invention was made between two great wars. With the advent of World War II, the need for such drugs increased dramatically because more people were dying. So this, combined with the problems of sulfa drugs, suddenly created a large market for penicillin. The third reason is that there was really no way to produce large quantities of penicillin in the beginning. This required major international efforts and numerous laboratories to make it possible. Thus, there were three very different and complementary reasons why penicillin took so long to take off.
Today’s venerated Romantic poet John Keats sold only a few hundred volumes of poetry in his lifetime, and did not enter the canonical canon until decades after his death.
Do you see all of this as an argument in favor of supporting more principled scientific research, to act as a nanny for these potential little sleeping beauties, so that they can wait out the right time?
certainly. I could point to a lot of different examples where people did something that was considered completely useless at the time. In fact, in certain scientific fields, some people pride themselves on doing “useless” work. There is, for example, number theory in which some very prominent number theorists have said; Basically mathematicians: “Well, what I’ve done in my life is completely useless!” And they were “proud” of it. They viewed their work as if it were art: there was an aesthetic component to it, but it did not necessarily have any application. Decades later it became clear – we can say – that the discoveries made by number theorists are mainly what powers e-commerce on the Internet.
So I think, in the long run, society benefits from being more foresight, and from saying, “Maybe we’ll keep doing ‘useless’ work, but we don’t really know, in advance, that all that work is going to be useless in the long run.” Rather, it would be short-sighted to focus only on applied work, applied science. Because much of basic science may have benefits that we cannot anticipate.
Are there any sleeping beauties you see in the world today?
We have no idea what huge reservoir of innovations may lie dormant, for example, in the microbial world. One example is antibiotic resistance. There is also another side to antibacterial drugs that we have not discovered: She might be sitting there waiting. Other possible examples are so-called plant secondary metabolites, in particular: chemicals produced by plants – usually in self-defense – that can be used for many purposes that we do not now anticipate. This is part of the reason why it is so important that we conserve biodiversity. Because there may be too many sleeping beauties in the world that we would destroy if we destroyed the biodiversity that exists today.Is there a Sleeping Beauty that has really enchanted you? Antibiotic resistance is older than antibiotics themselves, right? Therefore, there is the discovery of bacteria that had never been in contact with humanity – it was not possible for them to have been in contact with humanity at that time because they lived in underground caves that were isolated from the surface for millions of years, until researchers took samples from them and discovered them – and the formation of these bacteria Resistant to not just one but sometimes many antibiotics, including some made by humans. I think that’s absolutely amazing. I know everyone is talking about antibiotic resistance; How big a problem it is and how quickly bacteria develop resistance. But I think fewer of us appreciate how antibiotic resistance can actually be there as a latent trait, as a sleeping beauty in the microbial world, even before antibiotics arrive.So, “Sleeping Beauty” can be beautiful or ugly, depending on the context. exactly. It’s a double-edged sword. In this case, it’s pretty good for bacteria. Catherine Harman Courage: journalist and writer. Today, she is a science news editor at Vox, and writes for several sites. Her work ranges from breaking science news, food issues, and most recently the coronavirus pandemic. Her books include: “Octopus: The Most Mysterious Creature in the Sea” (2013), “Cultivated: How Ancient Foods Feed Human Microbes” (2019). Link to the original text:
