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Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and Culture
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48/99
Critics
25/99
Readers
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Scholars
82/99
Rating
15/99
Volume
37/99
Rating
13/99
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About This Book
Why do some of nature's marvels have to wait millions of years for their time in the sun? Life innovates constantly, producing perfectly adapted species – but there's a catch. 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? Looking at the book of life, from apex predators to keystone crops, and informed by his own cutting-edge experiments, renowned scientist Andreas Wagner demonstrates that innovations can come frequently and cheaply to nature, well before they are needed. We have found prehistoric bacteria that harbour the remarkable ability to fight off 21st-century antibiotics. And human history fits the pattern too, as life-changing technologies are invented only to be forgotten, languishing in the shadows before they finally take off. In probing the mysteries of these sleeping beauties, Wagner reveals a crucial part of nature's rich and strange tapestry.
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Reviews
"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 ..."
"The accessible prose ensures even excursions into molecular biology are comprehensible, and Wagner finds surprising depth in evolutionary history ..."
"The technology part is briskly covered in a final chapter — I would have loved more and, ideally, for it to be integrated throughout."
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