evolutionary innovation Quotes

Evolution ... is opportunistic, hence unpredictable.

Innovation is not a big breakthrough invention every time. Innovation is a constant thing. But if you don't have an innovative company [team], coming to work everyday to find a better way, you don't have a company[team]. You're getting ready to die on the vine. You're always looking for the next innovation, the next niche, the next product improvement, the next service improvement. But always trying to get better.

Language was such a profoundly new evolutionary innovation that our brains had to be completely redesigned in order to handle it.

If evolution was worth its salt, by now it should've evolved something better than survival of the fittest. I think a better idea would be survival of the wittiest.

As far as I can see, our concentration of different abilities in one species - there's nothing I can see that in this Darwinian evolution that could've done that. So it seems to be a miracle of some sort.

As a general rule, biology tends to be conservative. It's rare that evolution 'invents' the same process several times.

The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.

evolution is a tinkerer, an ad-hocker, and a jury-rigger. It works with what it has on hand, not with what it has in mind. Some of its inventions prove elegant, while in others you can see the seams and dried glue.

My whole interest is, how do you use evolution as an innovation engine? How does evolution solve new problems that life faces? And to have a system that can create a whole new chemical bond that biology hasn't done before, to me, demonstrates the power of nature to innovate.

Shake the tree of life itself and bring down fruits unheard of.

I don't want to disrupt anything. We never conceive of our products as disruptive - we don't look at something and say, 'Let's disrupt that.' It's always about how we can evolve this and make this better.