New Developments In Evolutionary Innovation

The growth of evolutionary thinking has had a profound impact on economic theory and related fields such as strategy and technological innovation. An important paradigm that underlies the evolutionary theory of innovation is neo-Darwinian evolution. According to this paradigm, evolution is gradualist and based on the mechanisms of variation, selection, and retention. Since the 1970s, theoretical advancements in evolutionary biology have recognised the central role of punctuated equilibrium, speciation, and exaptation. However, despite their significant influence in evolutionary biology, these advancements have been reflected only partially in evolutionary approaches to economics, strategy, and innovation. The aim of this book is to review these advancements and explore their implications, with a particular emphasis on the role of serendipity and unprestateability in innovation and novelty creation.

Evolutionary thinking has had a profound impact on theories of technological innovation and strategy. This volume explores how significant advancements made in evolutionary biology since the 1970s influence evolutionary approaches to these areas, with an emphasis on the role of serendipity and unprestateability in innovation and novelty creation.

The history of life is a nearly four billion year old story of transformative change. This change ranges from dramatic macroscopic innovations such as the evolution of wings or eyes, to a myriad of molecular changes that form the basis of macroscopic innovations. We are familiar with many examples of innovations (qualitatively new phenotypes that provide a critical benefit) but have no systematic understanding of the principles that allow organisms to innovate. This book proposes several such principles as the basis of a theory of innovation, integrating recent knowledge about complex molecular phenotypes with more traditional Darwinian thinking. Central to the book are genotype networks: vast sets of connected genotypes that exist in metabolism and regulatory circuitry, as well as in protein and RNA molecules. The theory can successfully unify innovations that occur at different levels of organization. It captures known features of biological innovation, including the fact that many innovations occur multiple times independently, and that they combine existing parts of a system to new purposes. It also argues that environmental change is important to create biological systems that are both complex and robust, and shows how such robustness can facilitate innovation. Beyond that, the theory can reconcile neutralism and selectionism, as well as explain the role of phenotypic plasticity, gene duplication, recombination, and cryptic variation in innovation. Finally, its principles can be applied to technological innovation, and thus open to human engineering endeavours the powerful principles that have allowed life's spectacular success.

Ground-breaking yet non-technical analysis of the analogy that technological artefacts 'evolve' like biological organisms.

A major synthesis of homology, written by a top researcher in the field Homology—a similar trait shared by different species and derived from common ancestry, such as a seal's fin and a bird’s wing—is one of the most fundamental yet challenging concepts in evolutionary biology. This groundbreaking book provides the first mechanistically based theory of what homology is and how it arises in evolution. Günter Wagner, one of the preeminent researchers in the field, argues that homology, or character identity, can be explained through the historical continuity of character identity networks—that is, the gene regulatory networks that enable differential gene expression. He shows how character identity is independent of the form and function of the character itself because the same network can activate different effector genes and thus control the development of different shapes, sizes, and qualities of the character. Demonstrating how this theoretical model can provide a foundation for understanding the evolutionary origin of novel characters, Wagner applies it to the origin and evolution of specific systems, such as cell types; skin, hair, and feathers; limbs and digits; and flowers. The first major synthesis of homology to be published in decades, Homology, Genes, and Evolutionary Innovation reveals how a mechanistically based theory can serve as a unifying concept for any branch of science concerned with the structure and development of organisms, and how it can help explain major transitions in evolution and broad patterns of biological diversity.

Evolutionary innovations—the bony skeleton of vertebrates, avian flight, or the insect pollination system of angiosperms, for example—have in recent years become the focus of much fertile new research in evolutionary biology. Innovations may hold the keys to understanding why whole new groups of organisms evolve or, conversely, why groups of organisms become extinct. This volume brings together contributors from the fields of morphology, genetics, embryology, physiology, and paleontology to present research on evolutionary innovations and to suggest directions for further work. The topics covered include the plurality of evolutionary innovations, patterns and processes at different hierarchical levels, evolutionary genetics of adaptations, heterochrony and other mechanisms of radical evolutionary change in early development, developmental mechanisms at the origin of morphological novelty, the evolution of morphological variation patterns, functional design and its punctuated products, plausibility and testability in assessing the consequences of evolutionary innovations, paradigms and pitfalls of studying physiological evolution, polyphyletic constructional breakthroughs in fossil and extant species, ecology of evolutionary innovations in the fossil record.

These original contributions by symbiosis biologists and evolutionary theorists address the adequacy of the prevailing neo-Darwinian concept of evolution in the light of growing evidence that hereditary symbiosis, supplemented by the gradual accumulation of heritable mutation, results in the origin of new species and morphological novelty.A departure from mainstream biology, the idea of symbiosis--as in the genetic and metabolic interactions of the bacterial communities that became the earliest eukaryotes and eventually evolved into plants and animals--has attracted the attention of a growing number of scientists.These original contributions by symbiosis biologists and evolutionary theorists address the adequacy of the prevailing neo-Darwinian concept of evolution in the light of growing evidence that hereditary symbiosis, supplemented by the gradual accumulation of heritable mutation, results in the origin of new species and morphological novelty. They include reports of current research on the evolutionary consequences of symbiosis, the protracted physical association between organisms of different species. Among the issues considered are individuality and evolution, microbial symbioses, animal-bacterial symbioses, and the importance of symbiosis in cell evolution, ecology, and morphogenesis. Lynn Margulis, Distinguished Professor of Botany at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, is the modern originator of the symbiotic theory of cell evolution. Once considered heresy, her ideas are now part of the microbiological revolution. ContributorsPeter Atsatt, Richard C. Back, David Bermudes, Paola Bonfante-Fasolo, René Fester, Lynda J. Goff, Anne-Marie Grenier, Ricardo Guerrero, Robert H. Haynes, Rosmarie Honegger, Gregory Hinkle, Kwang W. Jeon, Bryce Kendrick, Richard Law, David Lewis, Lynn Margulis, John Maynard Smith, Margaret J. McFall-Ngai, Paul Nardon, Kenneth H. Nealson, Kris Pirozynski, Peter W. Price, Mary Beth Saffo, Jan Sapp, Silvano Scannerini, Werner Schwemmler, Sorin Sonea, Toomas H. Tiivel, Robert K. Trench, Russell Vetter

This volume describes features of autonomy and integrates them into the recent discussion of factors in evolution. In recent years ideas about major transitions in evolution are undergoing a revolutionary change. They include questions about the origin of evolutionary innovation, their genetic and epigenetic background, the role of the phenotype and of changes in ontogenetic pathways. In the present book, it is argued that it is likewise necessary to question the properties of these innovations and what was qualitatively generated during the macroevolutionary transitions. The author states that a recurring central aspect of macroevolutionary innovations is an increase in individual organismal autonomy whereby it is emancipated from the environment with changes in its capacity for flexibility, self-regulation and self-control of behavior. The first chapters define the concept of autonomy and examine its history and its epistemological context. Later chapters demonstrate how changes in autonomy took place during the major evolutionary transitions and investigate the generation of organs and physiological systems. They synthesize material from various disciplines including zoology, comparative physiology, morphology, molecular biology, neurobiology and ethology. It is argued that the concept is also relevant for understanding the relation of the biological evolution of man to his cultural abilities. Finally the relation of autonomy to adaptation, niche construction, phenotypic plasticity and other factors and patterns in evolution is discussed. The text has a clear perspective from the context of systems biology, arguing that the generation of biological autonomy must be interpreted within an integrative systems approach.

“Carter Phipps brilliantly expands our understanding of evolution by showing us that a new science is emerging—one that will holistically integrate our understanding of consciousness, cosmology, and evolution.” —Deepak Chopra Blending cutting-edge ideas with incisive spiritual insights, Evolutionaries is the first popular presentation of an emerging school of thought called “evolutionary spirituality.” Carter Phipps, the former executive editor of EnlightenNext magazine, asserts that evolution is not only a scientific but also a spiritual idea in a book whose message has the power to bring new meaning and purpose to life as we know it. Readers will be fascinated and enlightened by Evolutionaries, a book which Deepak Chopra, the world-renowned author of The Seven Spiritual Laws of Superheroes, Jesus, and Buddha, says “is going to help create a worldview that will influence our vision of the future direction of evolution and also our role in consciously participating in it.”

Few of us, amidst our daily chores and responsibilities, consider how mundane infrastructures—from electrical grids to sewage systems—have developed over millennia in ways that enable everything we cherish, from democracy to technological innovation to individual liberty. But what drives the evolution of this infrastructure? And why is infrastructure so critical to human flourishing? In this book, the most innovative and interdisciplinary study of cultural evolution ever produced, new concepts are explored, new histories are brought into contact and new ground-breaking insights are defended. What makes creativity unique in human societies is not only our capacity to generate and modify our diverse individual intuitions about the social and physical world, but also our capacity to form and leave groups fluidly in a dancing rhythm of oscillation across the expanse of history. This book walks the reader carefully through these processes, with clear concepts and an approachable writing style.