Arrival the Fittest, Andreas Wagner
Arrival the Fittest, Andreas Wagner
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Arrival the Fittest
Solving Evolution's Greatest Puzzle

Author: Andreas Wagner

Narrator: Sean Pratt

Unabridged: 8 hr 29 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Ascent Audio

Published: 11/01/2014


Synopsis

“Natural selection can preserve innovations, but it cannot create them. Nature’s many innovations—some uncannily perfect—call for natural principles that accelerate life’s ability to innovate, its innovability.”

Darwin’s theory of natural selection explains how useful adaptations are preserved over time. But the biggest mystery about evolution eluded him. As genetics pioneer Hugo de Vries put it, “natural selection may explain the survival of the fittest, but it cannot explain the arrival of the fittest.”

Can random mutations over a mere 3.8 billion years really be responsible for wings, eyeballs, knees, camouflage, lactose digestion, photosynthesis, and the rest of nature’s creative marvels? And if the answer is no, what is the mechanism that explains evolution’s speed and efficiency?

In Arrival of the Fittest, renowned evolutionary biologist Andreas Wagner draws on over fifteen years of research to present the missing piece in Darwin's theory. Using experimental and computational technologies that were heretofore unimagined, he has found that adaptations are not just driven by chance, but by a set of laws that allow nature to discover new molecules and mechanisms in a fraction of the time that random variation would take.

Consider the Arctic cod, a fish that lives and thrives within six degrees of the North Pole, in waters that regularly fall below 0 degrees. At that temperature, the internal fluids of most organisms turn into ice crystals. And yet, the arctic cod survives by producing proteins that lower the freezing temperature of its body fluids, much like antifreeze does for a car’s engine coolant. The invention of those proteins is an archetypal example of nature’s enormous powers of creativity.

Meticulously researched, carefully argued, evocatively written, and full of fascinating examples from the animal kingdom, Arrival of the Fittest offers up the final puzzle piece in the mystery of life’s rich diversity.

About Andreas Wagner

Andreas Wagner is a professor and chairman at the department of evolutionary biology and environmental studies at the University of Zurich. He is the author of four books on evolutionary innovation, including Life Finds a Way, which is also published by Oneworld. He lives in Zurich.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Clif

It's true that evolutionary development of life depends on random mutations, but it's more complicated than that. Nature's building blocks of life (metabolic systems, protein interactions, and gene regulation networks) are unimaginably complex, yet they are endowed with inherent properties that are......more

Goodreads review by Eoin

I really wanted to love this book. I am a scientist. And luckily I am one who happens to love science. And I particularly love the topics this book covers (evolutionary genetics and bioinformatics). It is written with great wit, poise and profound knowledge. Unfortunately for Andreas Wagner, who is......more

Goodreads review by Dennis

Highly conceptual, “Arrival of the Fittest” walks you through the steps, not just of understanding a difficult question, but of learning a new kind of thinking. The creationist argument that since natural selection only preserves innovative traits and never actually creates them—and so the likelih......more

The philosopher Henri Bergson once wrote that every philosopher only ever really pursues one single idea, continuously reformulated, in different ways. While Andreas Wagner isn't exactly a philosopher, The Arrival of the Fittest is, if nothing else, a condensation of just what it means to take an id......more