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Darwin’s Paradox: so many different life forms, occupying such a vast array of ecological niches, inhabiting waters that are otherwise remarkably nutrient-poor. Coral reefs make up about one-tenth of one percent of the earth’s surface, and yet roughly a quarter of the known species of marine life make their homes there.
Kleiber discovered that this scaling phenomenon stuck to an unvarying mathematical script called “negative quarter-power scaling.” If you plotted mass versus metabolism on a logarithmic grid, the result was a perfectly straight line that led from rats and pigeons all the way up to bulls and hippopotami.
This means that a cow, which is roughly a thousand times heavier than a woodchuck, will, on average, live 5.5 times longer, and have a heart rate that is 5.5 times slower than the woodchuck’s.
the number of heartbeats per lifetime tends to be stable from species to species. Bigger animals just take longer to use up their quota.
the quarter-power law governing innovation was positive, not negative.
the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.
if you look at the entirety of the twentieth century, the most important developments in mass, one-to-many communications clock in at the same social innovation rate with an eerie regularity. Call it the 10/10 rule: a decade to build the new platform, and a decade for it to find a mass audience.
Going from analog television to HDTV is a change in degree, not in kind:
YouTube, on the other hand, radically altered the basic rules of the medium.
before the Web became mainstream in the mid-1990s, the pace of software innovation followed the exact same 10/10 pattern of development that we saw in the spread of other twentieth-century technologies.
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 you do only one new thing. By that measure, YouTube was significantly more innovative than HDTV, despite the fact that HDTV was a more complicated technical problem.
Some environments squelch new ideas; some environments seem to breed them effortlessly. The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.
The argument of this book is that a series of shared properties and patterns recur again and again in unusually fertile environments.
The amplification and adoption of useful innovation exist throughout natural history as well. Coral reefs are sometimes called the “cities of the sea,”
cities. In the language of complexity theory, these patterns of innovation and creativity are fractal: they reappear in recognizable form as you zoom in and out, from molecule to neuron to pixel to sidewalk.
When life gets creative, it has a tendency to gravitate toward certain recurring patterns, whether those patterns are emergent and self-organizing, or whether they are deliberately crafted by human agents.
The long-zoom approach lets us see that openness and connectivity may, in the end, be more valuable to innovation than purely competitive mechanisms.
we are often better served by connecting ideas than we are by protecting them.
Good ideas may not want to be free, but they do want to connect, fuse, recombine.
We have a natural tendency to romanticize breakthrough innovations, imagining momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition. But ideas are works of bricolage; they’re built out of that detritus.
evolution as a “tinkerer,” not an engineer;
the set of all those first-order combinations: “the adjacent possible.” The phrase captures both the limits and the creative potential of change and innovation.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering on the edges of the present state of things, a map of all the ways in which the present can reinvent itself.
one way to think about the path of evolution is as a continual exploration of the adjacent possible.
“the multiple”: A brilliant idea occurs to a scientist or inventor somewhere in the world, and he goes public with his remarkable finding, only to discover that three other minds had independently come up with the same idea in the past year.
Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts) over time.
every now and then an idea does occur to someone that teleports us forward a few rooms, skipping some exploratory steps in the adjacent possible. But those ideas almost always end up being short-term failures, precisely because they have skipped ahead. We have a phrase for those ideas: we call them “ahead of their time.”
The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you. This can be as simple as changing the physical environment you work in, or cultivating a specific kind of social network, or maintaining certain habits in the way you seek out and store information.
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.
Part of coming up with a good idea is discovering what those spare parts are, and ensuring that you’re not just recycling the same old ingredients.
The trick to having good ideas is not to sit around in glorious isolation and try to think big thoughts. The trick is to get more parts on the table.
A good idea is a network. A specific constellation of neurons—thousands of them—fire in sync with each other for the first time in your brain, and an idea pops into your consciousness.
an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.
two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can’t have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated.
The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations.
The connections are the key to wisdom, which is why the whole notion of losing neurons after we hit adult-hood is a red herring. What matters in your mind is not just the number of neurons, but the myriad connections that have formed between them.
The creating brain behaves differently from the brain that is performing a repetitive task. The neurons communicate in different ways. The networks take on distinct shapes.
The question is how to push your brain toward those more creative networks. The answer, as it happens, is delightfully fractal: to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible.
the unique property of the carbon atom: its combinatorial power. Carbon is a connector.
when we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a “randomizing” environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system.
innovative systems have a tendency to gravitate toward the “edge of chaos”: the fertile zone between too much order and too much anarchy.
the metaphor of different phases of matter—gas, liquid, solid—to describe these network states.
whenever human beings first organized themselves into settlements that resembled liquid networks, a great flowering of innovation would have immediately followed. For ages, early humans lived in the cultural equivalent of gaseous networks: small packs of hunter-gatherers bouncing around the landscape,
the kind of sharing that happens in these densely populated environments: “information spillover.”
somewhere within a thousand years of the first cities emerging, human beings invented a whole new way of inventing.
high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations.
a culture where the information is largely passed down by monastic scribes stands at the opposite extreme. A cloister is a solid.
no matter how smart the “authorities” may be, if they are outnumbered a thousand to one by the marketplace, there will be more good ideas lurking in the market than in the feudal castle.
large collectives are rarely capable of true creativity or innovation.
It’s not that the network itself is smart; it’s that the individuals get smarter because they’re connected to the network.
