Popular innovation thinker Steven Johnson shares his thoughts on the question: Where do good ideas?

Translation: Julia Varyga

In the past five years, I have been researching a very interesting question: where do good ideas come from? I think this problem is interesting for almost all of us. We want to be more creative, original. We want our organizations to become more modern.

To solve this problem, I decided to consider the influence of the environment. Under what circumstances were great discoveries made? I have found that there are certain patterns that are repeated over and over and have a huge impact on the creative process. One of them I called a premonition of delayed action. Great ideas almost never come in moments of insight, sudden bursts of inspiration. The most significant ideas require careful consideration, for a long time they remain in the background, they take two, three years, and sometimes ten, twenty years, in order to ultimately bring you success and benefit. This happens mainly because, thanks to a few minor guesses, something bigger eventually forms. This has happened all the time in the history of innovation. Sometimes it happens that someone owns only part of the idea.

The history of the creation of the World Wide Web by Timothy Bernes-Lee cannot be ignored. He worked on this project for ten years. In the early stages of development, Lee did not imagine the final image of his idea. He started with a project that can be called third-party for the final idea - to find a way to organize data. And only ten years later, a whole vision was formed, which turned into a consequence into the World Wide Web.

Most often, this is how ideas are born. They need an incubation period to mature and long time these ideas are carried out in the stage of that very presentiment. It is worth noting that at this stage they should collide with each other. Often a thought in one head becomes an idea by colliding with another thought in another head. So it is necessary to pave the way that allows thoughts to meet with each other. That is why simple coffee houses in the Enlightenment or salons and exhibitions in the Modern era turned into engines of creativity, they created a space where ideas mixed and combined, forming new forms.

When you look at the problem of innovation from this perspective, your reflections shed light on the many recent debates that you have witnessed about what the Internet is doing to our brains? Is a lifestyle that is constantly in touch and performs multi-level tasks harmful to us? Will it lead to the surface of ideas? Are we moving away from deep, thoughtful, slow reading? And I'm a big fan of reading, you know, but remember that the great driver of innovation has been the historical increase in interactions with other people, and the ability to freely exchange ideas, combine them with your own, turning them into something completely new.

This is what has had a huge creative effect over the past 600-700 years. And what has happened over the past 15 years is a real miracle. We have many new ways to connect, find people, and find missing links in our thought chains in order to get information that can confirm our hunches. This is a true example of what really is the source of good ideas - an environment that is conducive to the emergence of a unified mind.

Keywords: Where Good Ideas Come From, Innovative Thinker Steven Johnson, Inspiration, World Wide Web Story by Timothy Bernes-Lee

Marcel Kinsbourne

You don't have to be human to have a good idea. Enough to be a fish.

Micronesian shallow waters are home to large fish feeding on small fish. These fish lurk in burrows dug in the bottom silt, but from time to time they swim out in flocks in search of food. The big fish begin to swallow the small ones one by one, but they immediately hide back into their holes, and the meal of the big fish has just begun. What should she do?

I have been putting this problem before my students for many years. I remember only one student who came up with a Good Idea for a big fish. Of course, he did it after only a few minutes of thought, not after millions of years of evolution, but we don't have speed competitions, do we?

Here it is, a neat trick. As soon as a flock of fish appears, a big fish should not rush to swallow them - it should sink lower so that its belly touches the silt and blocks the minks that save the fish. And then she can calmly and slowly dine.

What does this example teach us? To come up with a good idea, it makes sense to abandon a bad one. The trick is to discard self-evident, seemingly easy, but ineffective approaches, thereby opening your mind to a better solution. In fish antiquity, this decision came to our large fish due to some kind of mutation and natural selection mechanisms. Instead of messing around with the obvious—eating faster, biting off bigger bites, etc.—just drop Plan A, and Plan B pops up in your head. Tip for people: If the second solution doesn’t work either, block that one too. – and wait. A third will appear in your mind. Further, the process can be repeated until the unsolvable is resolved, even if the most intuitively obvious options have to be rejected in the process of such enumeration.

To the amateur, a Good Idea seems like something magical, a kind of instantaneous intellectual insight. However, it is more likely that such an idea is the result of successive approximations, as described above: in this case, you have enough experience to reject seductive but dead-end paths. So from the ordinary, step by step, the extraordinary grows.

In the evolution of not only humans, but also other species, the emergence of a good idea is far from a rare thing. Many, if not most, species need some idea or clever trick from time to time to keep the species alive. When the best minds fail to solve some “classic” problem after decades or even centuries of relentless effort, they are probably trapped in a set of beliefs that are so obvious in a given culture that it never even occurs to anyone to question them. – or they take them for granted, almost without noticing. But the cultural context is changing, and what yesterday seemed completely obvious, today or tomorrow seems at least doubtful. Sooner or later, someone (perhaps no more gifted than his predecessors, but not bound by some "underlying" but incorrect assumption) will be able to stumble upon a solution with relative ease.

However, there is an alternative - if you are a fish, just wait a million or two years and see if any valuable idea pops up.

child question

Nicholas Christakis

Therapist, sociologist (Harvard University); book co-author Connected: The Surprising Power of Our Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives (« Related. About the amazing power of our social networks and how they shape our lives»)

My favorite explanation is the one I tried to find as a child. Why the sky is blue? Every kid asks this question, but it has been asked by most of the great scientists since Aristotle, including Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, René Descartes, Leonhard Euler, and even Albert Einstein.

Perhaps what I like most about this explanation (apart from the artless simplicity of the question itself) is how many centuries of human effort it took to get an acceptable answer and how many branches of science had to be involved in this.

Unlike other everyday phenomena like sunrise and sunset, the color of the sky did not inspire people (even the ancient Greeks or ancient Chinese) to create a large number myths, but for a long time there were still a number of unscientific explanations for the color of the sky. The azureness of the sky did not soon fall into the category of scientific problems, but when it did, it, frankly, attracted the attention of scientists for a long time. Why is the atmosphere colored even though the air we breathe is colorless?

As far as we know, Aristotle was the first to ask such a question. His answer, contained in the treatise On Flowers, says: the layers of air closest to us are colorless, and the air in the depths of the sky is blue, just like a thin layer of water is colorless, and in a deep well the water appears black. This idea is repeated already in the XIII century by Roger Bacon. Later, Kepler also put forward a similar explanation, stating that the air only looks colorless because the intensity of its color in a thin layer is small. However, none of them offered an explanation. blueness atmosphere.

In his workbook, later called the Leicester Codex, Leonardo da Vinci wrote at the beginning of the 16th century: “I believe that the blueness that we see in the atmosphere is not its own color, but is caused by the heating of the liquid, which, when evaporated, generates the tiniest and indistinguishable particles, attracted by the rays of the sun. These particles seem to shine against the background of the deep darkness of that area of ​​fire that forms the cover that lies above them. Alas, the great Leonardo does not give an answer why these particles must necessarily be blue.

Newton also contributed to the problem by asking why the sky is blue and by demonstrating, in a revolutionary experiment with refraction, that white light can be decomposed into its component colors.

After Newton, many scientists now forgotten and many still remembered by us joined the search for an answer. What could, as a result of refraction, give rise to the effect in which we observe such an excess of blue? In 1760, the mathematician Leonhard Euler suggested that the wave theory of light might explain why the sky is blue. The nineteenth century is characterized by a whirlwind of all kinds of experiments and scientific observations, from expeditions to the tops of the mountains to study the sky to the most sophisticated attempts to recreate its blueness in a special bottle, as described in Peter Pesic's wonderful book, which is called “Sky in a Bottle”. Countless careful observations of the blueness of the sky were carried out in various places, at various heights, at various times, including with the help of special instruments - cyanometers. The first cyanometer was created by Horace Benedict de Saussure in 1789. His device had 53 sections arranged in a circle, whose color corresponded to different gradations of blue. Saussure suggested that the reason for the blueness of the sky should be some kind of suspension present in the air.

For a long time, many other scientists also suspected that some kind of impurity in the air "modifies" the light, making it appear blue. Finally figured out what it does the air itself- air molecules in the gaseous state play a major role in its color. The color of the sky has a deep connection with atomic theory, and even with Avogadro's number. And this, in turn, attracted the attention of Einstein, who paid attention to this problem in the period from 1905 to 1910.

So, the sky has a blue color, because the incident light rays interact with air molecules that are in a gaseous state, so that more light in the blue part of the spectrum is scattered, reaching the surface of the planet and our eyes. In fact, all frequencies of incident light can scatter in this way, but blue (which has a relatively high frequency and relatively short wavelength) scatters more strongly than lower frequency hues, in a process known as Rayleigh scattering and described in the 1870s. John William Strutt (Lord Rayleigh), who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1904 for the discovery of argon, showed that when the wavelength of light is of the same order as the size of the gas molecules, the intensity of the scattered light varies inversely with the fourth power of its wavelength. Rays with a shorter wavelength (say, cyan, indigo, and violet) scatter more than rays with a longer wavelength. All air molecules seem to prefer to glow blue, which is what we see everywhere.

But then the sky should appear purple, because purple light scatters even more than blue. However, the sky does not seem purple: here comes the last - biological - part of the puzzle. As it turns out, our eyes are wired to be more sensitive to blue light than violet.

The explanation of why the sky is blue required the participation of a number of natural sciences, considering many factors: here are the colors of the optical spectrum, and the wave nature of light, and the angle at which the sun's rays enter the atmosphere, and the mathematics of light scattering, and the size of oxygen and nitrogen molecules, and even the features of the perception of light by the human eye. That's how much serious science it took to answer a single question that any child can ask.

The book Where Good Ideas Come From explores 7 principles that distinguish environments that “nourish” innovation. These principles are characteristic of open environments where minds are free to collide and unite.

Steven Johnson - About the Author

Steven Johnson is an American writer and media professional, author of the non-fiction bestsellers The Ghost Map, The Invention of Air, and Everything Bad Is Good for You. Stephen regularly writes essays and columns for Wired magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and also runs several of his own Internet projects.

Where Good Ideas Come From - Book Review

An idea is not only a great discovery in science or some kind of technological breakthrough. A brilliant idea is a new and precisely hitting solution to any actual problem through the use of existing resources. An idea is a solution to an actual problem by available means.

Principle 1. Related opportunities

Megacities and the Internet are examples of environments that are extremely favorable for the birth of innovative ideas

Megacities are rich in related opportunities, at least therefore, despite the stress, noise and bustle inherent in large cities, this environment is very favorable for innovation. The dynamics of the metropolis is rapidly creating new challenges, but it also prompts new solutions.

The Internet is an example of an environment in which the principle of adjacent possibilities works with incredible speed. As soon as some useful technology is created, then in combination with others it is immediately used to develop something new.
The brain contains over 100 billion neurons (nerve cells). Neurons form numerous connections with each other by transmitting electrical impulses. Groups of interconnected nerve cells are called neural networks.

Principle 2. Stirring medium

A human idea, a thought at the physiological level, is a synchronous discharge of thousands of nerve cells in the brain. In order to produce new ideas, adjacent possibilities must be used, and for this it is necessary that new connections are involved in the discharge in neural networks.

The long zoom method is used in research when, in order to reveal concepts, a problem needs to be looked at more broadly than is possible with a deep detailed approach.

The environment favorable for the work of the neural networks of the brain is a network where ideas constantly interact with each other.

Principle 3. Slowly Ripening Guesses

Innovation requires the very ability to create new connections and a mixing environment that favors random collisions.

The innovation network is a global mind, where each person's individual thought unites with others

Guess is a shaky and vulnerable substance. Encountering obstacles, it often crumbles, never turning into something meaningful. How to help guesswork survive?

1. Record.
Working with statements is the process of finding a balance between the order of records and the chaos of thoughts. It is a dialogue with oneself, with a different self. However, these entries should not be strictly ordered, since the idea requires space to provide a sufficient degree of unpredictability for thought to work.

2. Organize the space.
Statements alone are not enough. If your direct duties are related to one thing, and the idea is completely different, then in the bustle of work it is not easy to keep a guess that has been ripening for many years. But someone is lucky, and they have time to think about their idea.
How to help hunches survive: write down and organize a favorable space

Principle 4. Random connections

Random connections, adjoining possibilities are additions, clues for non-dispersed, whole thought.

To help the neural networks of the brain form random connections, you need to at least sometimes stop controlling the thought process: take a walk, read books, write out quotes and make your own notes.

It is necessary to let go of thoughts; at least sometimes stop controlling the thought process; unload the mind from daily tasks, thereby allowing it to explore and try something new in the labyrinths of your thoughts

Principle 5. Mistakes

Evolution in our world is a series of mistakes. Changes are mutations, and mutations are random errors. modern science confirms that the diversity of species on the planet is due to random mutations with subsequent consolidation of beneficial changes. Of course, mutations that are too large can be fatal. Some scientists believe that nature is looking for a balance between exact copying and excessive errors. We have already mentioned the fact that the level of mutations is directly related to the level of environmental stress. Hostile external environment requires innovation. Creativity requires room for creative mistakes.

Mistakes also stimulate creative thinking.

Principle 6. New application

This principle consists in using something not for its intended purpose, not in the way it was originally intended, that is, about exaptation. The World Wide Web is a huge field for exploiting the possibilities of exaptation.

Fluids promote exaptation, that is, the principle that ideas find new uses (often at the level of metaphor) in other disciplines.

Exptational ideas are facilitated by weak ties that allow the exchange of thoughts and insights from different fields of knowledge. Exploration ideas are facilitated by multitasking, when the researcher works on different topics in parallel (focusing on one) and changes working tools.

Principle 7. Platforms

What do emergent platforms built by nature and man have in common?
1. Stack structure - last in, first out (English last in - first out, LIFO). This principle means that you can use what has already been invented before you, there is no need to reinvent the wheel. Before the structure of DNA could be understood, Mendelian and population genetics had to come first; the understanding of DNA enabled the development of molecular genetics; Evolutionary psychology is gaining momentum these days. Often, for a new discovery, the ground must be ready, the ground in the form of discoveries already made in a number of other areas.
2. Openness of platforms.
Let's pay attention to how rapidly the service of short messages Twitter is developing. The service itself has changed little since its inception, but the number of applications of the program is constantly growing. This was made possible by the fact that Dorsey, Williams and Stone created Twitter as an open system based on API (Application Program Interface, API). This approach allows anyone to write an application on and for the Twitter platform.
3. Platforms love trash.
Emerging platforms love garbage, in other words, resources that are already available. The most significant resource in the city is real estate. Expensive, new real estate is an unaffordable luxury for risky undertakings. Abandoned old spaces have long attracted creative people. There are well-known examples of giants such as Hewlett-Packard, Apple and Google originating in the garages.

There are several authors I recommend to leaders (and I recommend reading everything they write): Jim Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, Patrick Lencioney, and Steven Berlin Johnson. The last of these authors can most likely be called the least known of them. One of my most well-read mentors, Reed Face, led me to Johnson's work, chastising me for not reading his book Emergence: The Interconnection of Ant Life, Minds, Cities, and Software.

In short, this "emergence theory" describes how Google, Facebook, or Wikipedia can achieve in a few years what other organizations have taken decades to achieve (both in terms of the amount of work and the scale of achievements). Moreover, the principles described in the book can be applied to accelerate the growth of any business.

Johnson's latest book, Where Ideas Come From: A History of Innovation, expands on the ideas expressed in Emergence and debunks many of the myths surrounding innovation. More importantly, it explores in depth the reasons why new ideas die in one environment and effortlessly thrive in another. Again, all companies can learn a couple of lessons from Johnson's discoveries to increase the number of ideas generated, which is the basis of company growth. As Johnson eloquently puts it, "The main idea running through the book is that it is often more useful to connect ideas than to defend them ... they (ideas) want to complement each other as much as they want to compete."

In my environment, I meet many investors and would-be entrepreneurs who are reluctant to share their ideas for fear of being stolen. In fact, there is a high chance that someone else is working on the same innovation, and the person who shares their idea with the most people will get more feedback and come up with the best idea faster. Look at your company: does it encourage hiding or spreading information? Are there employees in your company who benefit from knowing more and therefore are not interested in sharing their knowledge with others? Relationships within the organization need to be set up so that the dissemination of knowledge is supported and stimulated.

The chances of success when discussing ideas depend on the size, variety and quality of the network of contacts. Therefore, in certain cities or environments, important breakthroughs are made more often. People who consciously choose to go to lunch with colleagues from other departments or divisions significantly increase their chances of generating better ideas. Those who specifically surround themselves with friends with diverse backgrounds and interests also perform better. As Johnson notes, “It is wrong to think that the network is smart. It is people who become smarter when they are connected to the network.” And if a diverse group of people can meet somewhere, the likelihood of a great idea is increased even more. Johnson talks about research by Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at McGill University who has directly observed scientists to determine how their great discoveries are born. Johnson writes, "The most surprising discovery of Dunbar's research was the physical location where most of the important breakthroughs occurred." It turned out that great discoveries are not made in laboratories, where a lone scientist sits at a microscope and suddenly makes a discovery. Dunbar noticed that the most important ideas came during regular meetings, where ten to fifteen researchers met and talked informally about what they were working on. “If you look at Dunbar’s idea map,” writes Johnson, “the basis of innovation was not the microscope, but round table". Therefore, even with all the advanced technology of modern laboratories, the most effective tool for generating good ideas is still a group of people around a table having a professional conversation with each other.

The 3M Innovation Center in Austin, Texas, one of the most advanced facilities I have ever visited, is specifically designed to encourage new ideas. The main thing that all companies can use from their experience is the creation of one common space that provokes communication. This is especially important when a growing company adds another floor to its building space. Close toilets and break rooms on the same floor, and make sure that people on adjacent floors bump into each other more often.

The main bad news and the good news about breakthrough innovation is a long process. Shout "Eureka!" is born not as a result of instant insight, but at the end of a slow, tortuous, thorny path which often takes a decade or more of concentrated effort. You may already be ahead of everyone in your industry if you have invested time and effort into this process. But it may also happen that someone is already ahead of you, starting ten years ago. Apple's design excellence began with calligraphy classes that Steve Jobs went to university nearly four decades ago.

The main thing is that it is never too late to start. Surround yourself with different, different people, spend a lot of time discussing important ideas with them, and keep going until you find an innovation that will change the world - or at least your company!

“If only you knew from what rubbish ...” - this can be said not only about poetry. Great inventions, creative ideas, and just plain good ideas sometimes come to us in surprising ways. The book of the famous American popularizer of science Stephen Johnson "Where Good Ideas Come From" tells how innovations that change our world are born, survive and develop. This winter it will be published by the AST publishing house.

Handyman Evolution

One fine day in the late 1870s, the Parisian obstetrician Stéphane Tarnier took a day off at the Maternité de Paris hospital, a maternity hospital for the poor where he worked, and went to the zoo in the Bois de Boulogne. Walking between elephant and reptile enclosures, among gardens with exotic plants, Tarnier stumbled upon an exhibition of incubators. The sight of chickens, timidly scurrying about in a warm incubator, prompted the obstetrician to some thoughts, and soon, with the help of the director of the zoo, Odile Martin, he designed a couveuse (French couveuse - “hen”) for the hospital - something like an incubator, but not for chickens, but for newborns babies.
By modern standards, infant mortality in the late 19th century was very high, even in a city like Paris. Every fifth child died before he had time to learn to crawl, and as for premature babies, they had very little chance. Tarnier knew that keeping babies at the right temperature was critical to the survival of babies, and he also knew that French medicine was obsessed with statistics. When an incubator was installed in the maternity hospital, where the babies were heated with warm water bottles located under it, Tarnier did a small study, estimating the survival rate of 500 children. The results shocked Parisian physicians: Normally, low-birth-weight babies had a 66% mortality rate, but if they were placed in a Tarnier incubator, the mortality rate dropped to 38%. That is, the death rate of premature babies could be reduced by almost half, simply by treating them like chickens in a zoo.
The Tarnier incubator was not the first device for nursing newborns, and the device that he created with Martin was significantly improved in the following decades. However statistical analysis Tarnier gave the necessary impetus to development new technology: already a few years later, the Parisian municipality demanded that such incubators be installed in all maternity hospitals. In 1896, the enterprising doctor Alexander Lyon demonstrated at the Berlin Industrial Exhibition "Children's Hatchery" (Kinderbrutenstalt) - a couveuse with live babies. The exhibit enjoyed extraordinary success, and as a result, a rather strange tradition was formed to arrange such demonstrations of couveuses. This continued into the 20th century (the amusement park on Coney Island in New York had such an exhibition until the early 1940s).
After World War II, modern incubators equipped with oxygen and other devices became standard in all American hospitals. As a result, infant mortality decreased by 75% between 1950 and 1998. And because incubators help you survive early in life, their public health benefits (in terms of increased life expectancy) outweigh any other medical innovations of the 20th century. Radiation therapy and double shunting can add another 10-20 years to the patient's life, but the incubator gives a person a lifetime.
However, infant mortality is still high in developing countries. Although in Europe and the United States it is less than ten deaths per thousand births, but in countries such as Libya or Ethiopia, more than a hundred out of a thousand newborns die. Basically, these are premature babies who could survive with an incubator. But modern couveuses are complicated and expensive. A standard incubator in an American hospital can cost upwards of $40,000. Moreover, the high cost is not the main problem. Sophisticated equipment often breaks down and requires specialists and spare parts to repair it. Within a year after the catastrophic tsunami in the Indian Ocean (December 26, 2004), eight couveuses were delivered to the severely damaged Indonesian city of Meulaboh as part of international assistance. But when MIT professor Timothy Prestero visited the city's hospitals in late 2008, it turned out that all eight incubators were out of order due to power surges and tropical humidity, and none of the hospital staff could read the manual written in English. The Meulaboh incubators are a representative sample: some studies show that 95% of medical devices shipped to developing countries fail within the first five years of operation.
Presteros were very interested in these broken incubators because non-profit organization Design Matters, which he founded, worked for several years to develop a more reliable and cheaper incubator. At the same time, Prestero understood that in the developing world, complex medical equipment is treated differently than in hospitals in America and Europe. It was necessary not only to make a working apparatus; it was also necessary to provide that inept operation could not hopelessly put the device out of action. It was impossible to guarantee the availability of either spare parts or trained repairmen. So Prestero and his collaborators decided to build an incubator out of something that is plentiful even in the developing world. The idea came from Boston physician Jonathan Rosen, who drew attention to the fact that even in small towns in developing countries, people know how to keep cars in working order. There are no air conditioners, no laptops, no cable TV in these places, but Toyotas still drive on the roads. And Rosen suggested that Prestero make a jugs out of car parts.
Three years later, the Prestero group built a prototype incubator called NeoNurture. Outside, it was very elegant and looked no worse than any modern couveuse, but inside it consisted of automotive parts. Optical elements of headlights gave heat; dashboard fans circulated filtered air, and a horn was used as an alarm. The device could be powered through the cigarette lighter or from a conventional motorcycle battery. Creating a device from car parts was doubly beneficial, because local car parts and local car mechanics could be used. Both, as Rosen noted, are abundant in developing countries. You don't need to be a trained medical technician to repair NeoNurture, you don't even need to read the manual. It is enough to be able to change the light bulb in the headlight.
NeoNurture is a clear example of a good idea. Such ideas are always limited by the available materials and skills. We all have a natural tendency to idealize revolutionary innovations. We imagine how brilliant ideas overcome boundaries, how a brilliant mind sees beyond the fragments of old ideas and ossified traditions. But in fact, good ideas are based on the use of improvised materials, they are created from these very fragments. We take ideas inherited from older generations, or those that came to our own minds, and combine them into some new form. We like to think of a good idea as a brand new $40,000 incubator straight off the assembly line, but in fact, great inventions are more often assembled from spare parts lying around in the garage.
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002) assembled a collection of shoes that he bought while traveling in developing countries in the bazaars of Quito, Nairobi and Delhi. These were sandals made from old car tires. Although they are not particularly elegant, Gould considered them a vivid manifestation of human genius and saw in them a reflection of the patterns of biological progress. Natural innovation also relies on the use of spare parts. Evolution uses available resources, making new combinations of them for new purposes. The molecular biologist François Jacob had this in mind when he argued that evolution is more of a "handyman" than a "professional engineer." Our bodies also work on the material at hand - something radically new is created from old parts. Gould wrote: “The tire-in-sandal principle works at all levels and at all times, making possible at any moment incredible and unpredictable innovations. Because of this, nature is no less inventive than an unknown resourceful genius who first assessed the potential of a landfill in Nairobi.
This principle can also be seen in action at the beginning of life as such. We do not yet know all the subtleties of this process. Some believe that life originated in the boiling mouth of an underwater volcano, others think that it appeared in the open sea, others, following Darwin, assign a special role to tidal zones. Many respected scientists believe that life could have come from space with meteorites. However, thanks to prebiotic chemistry, we have a fairly clear idea of ​​the composition of the Earth's atmosphere before the appearance of life. At that time, a handful of molecules dominated the Earth: ammonia, methane, water, carbon dioxide, a few amino acids, and other simple organic compounds. Each of these molecules could react with others.
Imagine these primary molecules and all the possible combinations they can spontaneously form by simply colliding with each other (or using additional energy - for example, obtained from a lightning strike). If we play god and run all these reactions, we have most of the building blocks of life: the amino acids that make up cells and the sugars needed for the nucleotides that make up DNA. But you can't trigger a reaction that would produce a mosquito, a sunflower, or a human brain. Formaldehyde appears as a result of primary reactions: it can be obtained directly from the molecules of the "primordial soup". The atoms that make up a sunflower flower are no different from those that existed on Earth long before the appearance of life, but it is impossible to create a flower directly from them, because the emergence of a sunflower requires a series of sequential innovations that took billions of years. Chloroplasts are needed to capture and process solar energy; vascular tissues for nutrient circulation; DNA molecules to pass on instructions to the next generations.
Biologist Stuart Kauffman has proposed calling the set of all primary combinations "adjacent possibilities". This definition reflects both the limitations and the creative potential of change and innovation. In the case of prebiotic chemistry, the related possibilities are all the molecular reactions that are possible directly in the primordial soup. Sunflower, mosquito and brain are beyond these possibilities. Adjacent opportunities are an uncertain future that begins just beyond the status quo, the current state of affairs; these are all possible ways in which the present can move.
However, this is not an endless space, not an endless playing field. The number of possible primary reactions is enormous, but still finite, and most of the forms that inhabit the present biosphere are missing from them. The concept of adjacent possibilities says that at any given time the world is capable of certain changes, but only a few of them actually occur.
A strange and beautiful feature of this concept is that the boundaries of adjacent possibilities expand as they are used. Each new combination opens up new possible combinations. Imagine a house that with every open door miraculously increases. You are in a room with four doors, each leading to a new room you haven't been to yet. These four rooms are adjoining possibilities. But as soon as you open the door and enter one of these rooms, three new doors will appear in front of you, each of which leads to a new room that you could not enter directly from the first one. Keep opening new doors and eventually you will build a palace.