Sleeping Beauties

The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture

By: Andreas Wagner

Narrated by: Ulf Bjorklund

Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species—but there's a catch.

Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these 'sleeping beauties' crop up everywhere. But why?

Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed. We have found prehistoric bacteria that harbor the remarkable ability to fight off twenty-first-century antibiotics. And human history fits the pattern too, as life-changing technologies are invented only to be forgotten, languishing in the shadows before they finally take off.

In probing the mysteries of these sleeping beauties, Wagner reveals a crucial part of nature's rich and strange tapestry.

©2023 Andreas Wagner (P)2023 Tantor

Great overview of how evolution emerges again and again

Overall a great overview of how evolution emerges from the cellular level up to social and technological levels. It can feel a bit slow in the in the introduction but it’s worth sticking with.

popularized

I wish this had been more into the science rather than the "story". It seemed to be greatly simplified, I guess to make it palatable to a greater common denominator.

very geeky but still interesting

Covering multiple
fields of science and creativity, the author makes a strong case that there are opportunities existing already in nature and in existing inventions that are just waiting for the right time and place to be useful