Arrival of the Fittest Quotes

“Only theory can turn a heap of facts into a tower of knowledge”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“Innovation is combinatorial. It combines old things to make the new.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“The power of natural selection is beyond dispute, but this power has limits. Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. And calling the change that creates them random is just another way of admitting our ignorance about it.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“The evolutionary algorithms that mimic biological evolution are powerful tools, but they’re still missing something. They are still deficient in the recombination department so central to biological innovations.31 Nature is better at recombination, much better, for one simple reason: standards.”
― Andreas Wagner, The Arrival of the Fittest

“Enviromental change requires complexity, which begets robustness, which begets genotype networks, which enable innovations, the very kind that allow life to cope with enviromental change, increase its complexity, and so on, in an ascending spiral of ever-increasing innovability.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

“The hypothetical RNA replicase would be a self-replicating molecule, while the citric acid cycle is an autocatalytic network of chemical reactions. This isn’t a shortcoming of the citric acid cycle, but another hint that a defining feature of life may not require RNA replicators and their genetic information: Life can exist before genes.”
― Andreas Wagner, Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle