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Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture
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59
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
38/100Critics
81/100Scholars
Author:
Andreas Wagner
Publisher:
Oneworld Publications
Date:
May 9, 2023
Many animals and plants eke out seemingly unremarkable lives. Passive, constrained, modest, threatened. Then, in a blink of evolutionary time, they flourish spectacularly. Once we start to look, these "sleeping beauties" crop up everywhere. But why? Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed.
What The Reviewers Say
Revision in response to new information is what science is all about. Sleeping Beauties fits, well, beautifully into this process, and its author is in the forefront of important additions to our grasp of how evolution proceeds.
Where Wagner really excels is in the detail — especially when it comes to his own field.
The accessible prose ensures even excursions into molecular biology are comprehensible, and Wagner finds surprising depth in evolutionary history.
