Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity

‘This is a wonderful, mind-expanding book. Prepare to be surprised, enlightened and awed as Wagner reveals the sources of human and natural creativity.’

• Alice Roberts

In Darwin’s survival of the fittest, each step must be uphill as life progresses towards an evolutionary peak. There is no turning back. So what happens when life needs to cross a valley in the wilds of an adaptive landscape to reach the highest summit?

World-renowned biologist Andreas Wagner reveals that life does not only walk - it also leaps.

Drawing on pioneering research, Wagner explores life’s creative process and how it bears a striking resemblance to how we humans work. A beguiling symmetry links Picasso struggling through forty versions of Guernica and the way evolution transformed a dinosaur’s claw into a condor’s wing. This new understanding is already revolutionising our approach to problem-solving across the sciences. In the near future, applied in spheres as diverse as the economy and education, it will enable us to do so much more.

Life Finds a Way is a thought-provoking and deeply hopeful look at the force that shapes our world.