Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation

268 Pages·2010·1.36 MB·English

by  Johnson Steven

Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction

I. - THE ADJACENT POSSIBLE
II. - LIQUID NETWORKS
III. - THE SLOW HUNCH
IV. - SERENDIPITY
V. - ERROR
VI. - EXAPTATION
VII. - PLATFORMS

Conclusion
Acknowledgements
Notes and Further Reading
Bibliography
Index
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Copyright © 2010 by Steven Johnson
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Published simultaneously in Canada

Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint from Franco Moretti,
Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History. Verso, 2007. Copyright
© Franco Moretti 2007. All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Johnson, Steven, date.
Where good ideas come from : the natural history of innovation / Steven Johnson.
p. cm.
eISBN : 978-1-10144420-7
1. Creative thinking. I. Title.
BF408.J
303.48’4—dc22

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For Peter
Introduction
REEF, CITY, WEB

. . . as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.

—SHAKESPEARE, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, V.i.14-17
Darwin’s Paradox
April 4, 1836. Over the eastern expanse of the Indian Ocean, the reliable
northeast winds of monsoon season have begun to give way to the serene days of
summer. On the Keeling Islands, two small atolls composed of twenty-seven
coral islands six hundred miles west of Sumatra, the emerald waters are
invitingly placid and warm, their hue enhanced by the brilliant white sand of
disintegrated coral. On one stretch of shore usually guarded by stronger surf, the
water is so calm that Charles Darwin wades out, under the vast blue sky of the
tropics, to the edge of the live coral reef that rings the island.
For hours he stands and paddles among the crowded pageantry of the reef.
Twenty-seven years old, seven thousand miles from London, Darwin is on the
precipice, standing on an underwater peak ascending over an unfathomable sea.
He is on the edge of an idea about the forces that built that peak, an idea that will
prove to be the first great scientific insight of his career. And he has just begun
exploring another hunch, still hazy and unformed, that will eventually lead to the
intellectual summit of the nineteenth century.
Around him, the crowds of the coral ecosystem dart and shimmer. The sheer
variety dazzles: butterflyfish, damselfish, parrotfish, Napoleon fish, angelfish;
golden anthias feeding on plankton above the cauliflower blooms of the coral;
the spikes and tentacles of sea urchins and anemones. The tableau delights
Darwin’s eye, but already his mind is reaching behind the surface display to a
more profound mystery. In his account of the Beagle’s voyage, published four
years later, Darwin would write: “It is excusable to grow enthusiastic over the
infinite numbers of organic beings with which the sea of the tropics, so prodigal
of life, teems; yet I must confess I think those naturalists who have described, in
well-known words, the submarine grottoes decked with a thousand beauties,
have indulged in rather exuberant language.”
What lingers in the back of Darwin’s mind, in the days and weeks to come, is
not the beauty of the submarine grotto but rather the “infinite numbers” of
organic beings. On land, the flora and fauna of the Keeling Islands are paltry at
best. Among the plants, there is little but “cocoa-nut” trees, lichen, and weeds.
“The list of land animals,” he writes, “is even poorer than that of the plants”: a
handful of lizards, almost no true land birds, and those recent immigrants from
European ships, rats. “The island has no domestic quadruped excepting the pig,”
Darwin notes with disdain.
Yet just a few feet away from this desolate habitat, in the coral reef waters, an
epic diversity, rivaled only by that of the rain forests, thrives. This is a true
mystery. Why should the waters at the edge of an atoll support so many different