Quotes from Andreas Wagner

Only theory can turn a heap of facts into a tower of knowledge

change requires destruction, whether or not you value the destroyed.

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.

Innovation is combinatorial. It combines old things to make the new.

If we stopped arguing for one true view and conceded that we had a choice in this matter, we might gain the ability to choose flexibly. We could then more easily choose perspectives that allow us to solve problems we humans care about, problems that require delicate decisions, such as how to best distribute resources in a country, how to provide for and educate a population, and how to improve its intelligence.

This is one of nature's lessons for innovable technologies: If we want to open nature's black box of innovation, Ockham's razor is much too dull. Like oil and water, simplicity and innovability don't mix.

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.

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.