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Overview
Four billion years ago, carbon atoms were floating around in the primordial soup. But as life began, those atoms did not spontaneously arrange themselves into complex life forms like sunflowers or squirrels. First, they had to form simpler structures like molecules, polymers, proteins and cells. Each step along the way opened up possibilities for new combinations until finally a carbon atom could reside in a sunflower. Similarly, eBay could not be created in the 1950s because first someone had to invent computers and then figure out how to connect them together so that information can be shared between them. Then someone needed to create a World Wide Web where people can browse through different websites on their computer screens and then came online payment systems that allow users of eBay (and other similar sites) to pay for items using credit cards or bank accounts etc..
Evolution and innovation are both constrained by the adjacent possible. The adjacent possible is the set of all things that could happen at a given time. Great leaps beyond the adjacent possible are rare, but they can be made if there’s a need for them in society or technology. If YouTube had been launched in 1990s, it would have failed since neither fast Internet connections nor video players were available then. It was only when several people discovered how to make videos viewable online simultaneously that success came to YouTube.
Carl Wilhelm Scheele and Joseph Priestley discovered oxygen at around the same time, even though they weren’t aware of each other’s work. However, their discoveries were inevitable because they both started from the same point—the discovery that air is a mixture of gases.
Big Idea #1: World-changing ideas generally evolve over time as slow hunches rather than as sudden breakthroughs.
Although discoveries may seem like they’re discovered in a single, definable moment, that’s not the case. They tend to be slowly developing hunches that require time and attention to fully develop.
Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection was not an epiphany. Instead, it came from a slow and gradual hunch that he had been thinking about for years before the idea fully formed in his head.
The theory of evolution by natural selection seems so simple and obvious in retrospect. Charles Darwin himself said, “It is the most beautiful of all theories.”
A slow hunch led to a revolution in the way we share information today. Tim Berners-Lee, as a child, read a Victorian how-to book and was fascinated by the “portal of information” he found there. He tinkered with something similar for years before finally getting authorization from his employer to work on it full time. After decades of development, the World Wide Web was born.
Big Idea #2: Platforms are like springboards for innovations.
An ecologist is an expert in the science of ecology. An ecosystem is a complex community of organisms and their physical environment. A keystone species is one that has a disproportionate effect on its environment, particularly when it comes to maintaining balance within the system. For example, wolves are predators who keep sheep populations under control by eating them. If there were no other predators present, then the number of sheep would increase until they ate all the vegetation on the island and destroyed its ecosystem.
About twenty years ago, ecologists realized that there was a specific type of keystone species. These ecosystem engineers actually build habitats for other organisms and create platforms from which others benefit. For example, beavers dam rivers, turning forests into wetlands, and corals build thriving reefs in the middle of the ocean.
