Review by SFI Professor Chris Kempes
The built and natural worlds around us are full of examples of diversity from small, incremental evolutionary changes. Keyboard designs offer slightly different key spacing and press stiffness; two species appear almost identical, save for a slight change in body size. But sometimes, something entirely original appears. So, how do radically different entities come to be? How does the world produce true novelty? In his new book, The Origins of the New, SFI External Professor Doug Erwin argues that the generation of novelty, and not just the mundane speciation that we are familiar with, is a central topic in science.
Erwin situates novelty as something much deeper than the constant generation of endless diversity, and through a meticulous account of the major debates in the study of evolution, illustrates that novelty has been both under-appreciated and dealt with through incomplete theories.
Erwin’s scope is not simply organisms. He spans the earliest evolution of life on Earth, through the major transitions to the current world of radical transformation in human language, culture, and technology. His polymathic powers are on full display in this book, and there is a huge amount to learn bibliographically, conceptually, historically, biologically, and culturally. Along the way to developing his own framework, Erwin illustrates how ideas come in and out of favor, rescues forsaken characters and their descendant ideas from history, and with great precision and subtlety, shows that it is often only aspects of theories, rather than entire theories, that are right or wrong. Erwin is exceptionally fair to the long arc of arguments made by figures both past and contemporary, and he even includes a fair assessment of his own proposals.
Such a fair adjudicator of knowledge and theories is a wonderfully rare find. Erwin is a very well-known paleontologist and the former curator of the Burgess Shale at the Smithsonian. He holds unusual expertise in both traditional fossil excavations and evaluations and the frontier of molecular biology, particularly with respect to development and regulation. He uses both areas of expertise to illustrate ideas through detailed examples, and his conceptual framework for novelty manages to be both general and ambitious while being grounded in an array of convincing facts.
In his framework, Erwin argues for the central role of potentiation — small evolutionary events that open up radical new spaces and set the stage for a future novelty. Potentiation, he argues, is essential to explain the history of life. Without this framework, other theories of innovation and novelty are incomplete. Erwin also shows how novelty is a frontier in complexity science with a loopy and impossible-to-predict character — a consideration that matters centrally for cells and societies alike.
The coarse stratigraphy of this wonderful book covers a broad scope of concepts, embedded in which are gems of case studies, facts, and fascinating historical asides. Enjoy this book for the overarching concepts and the page-by-page fascinalia!