The Runaway Species

The Runaway Species Plot Summary

Introduction

Andrew Wiles was just ten years old when he discovered Fermat's Last Theorem in his local library. The mathematical puzzle, unsolved for over 300 years, captured his imagination completely. What began as childhood fascination evolved into a lifelong obsession. After earning his doctorate and establishing himself as a respected mathematician, Wiles made an extraordinary decision. He disappeared from the academic spotlight, secluding himself in his attic for seven years to work on solving the theorem that had haunted generations of brilliant minds. Day after day, he filled blackboards with equations, erased them, and started again. When he finally announced his proof in 1993, the mathematical world erupted in celebration. But the triumph was short-lived. A critical flaw was discovered in his work. Rather than giving up, Wiles retreated once more, working feverishly until, a year later, he finally corrected the error and completed the proof that had consumed his life. This remarkable story exemplifies the creative courage that drives human innovation. Throughout history, our species has demonstrated an unparalleled ability to reimagine the world around us. We bend, break, and blend existing ideas to forge new paths forward. This creative impulse isn't limited to artistic expression—it's fundamental to scientific breakthroughs, technological revolutions, and social transformations. The human brain is uniquely wired to generate novelty, to see beyond what exists to what could be. By understanding the patterns behind our most innovative thinking, we can cultivate environments where creativity flourishes, whether in classrooms, boardrooms, or our personal pursuits. The journey ahead explores how our minds navigate the unknown, how we can embrace productive risk-taking, and why our capacity for imaginative thinking might be our most precious human gift.

Chapter 1: The Innovative Human: NASA, Picasso, and Our Creative Drive

In 1970, the Apollo 13 spacecraft was hurtling through space when an oxygen tank exploded, putting the lives of three astronauts in grave danger. Back at Mission Control, engineers faced a seemingly impossible challenge: they needed to find a way to filter toxic carbon dioxide from the cabin using only the limited materials available on the spacecraft. Working against the clock, they gathered items that matched the inventory aboard Apollo 13 - plastic bags, cardboard, a sock, and duct tape - and fashioned a makeshift air filter. Through rapid innovation and creative problem-solving, they saved the astronauts' lives. Decades earlier, in a small Parisian studio, Pablo Picasso was working on what would become one of the most revolutionary paintings in art history: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. Breaking from centuries of artistic tradition, Picasso distorted human forms, incorporated mask-like faces, and shattered conventional perspectives. When he first showed the work to friends, they were shocked and concerned for his mental health. The painting remained rolled up in his closet for nine years before being exhibited publicly. Today, it's considered the cornerstone of modern art. These two stories might seem worlds apart - one about engineers solving a life-or-death crisis, the other about an artist creating a controversial painting. Yet beneath the surface, they reveal the same fundamental human capacity: our drive to innovate. Whether saving lives or revolutionizing art, humans constantly absorb the world around them and transform it into something new. We don't passively record experience; we actively reshape it. What makes humans uniquely creative compared to other species? Our brains have evolved with an extraordinary capacity to run "what-if" simulations. While other animals might solve problems through trial and error, humans can mentally test countless possibilities before taking action. This ability to imagine alternative realities is the cornerstone of innovation. We're constantly balancing between exploiting what we know works and exploring new possibilities - between the familiar and the novel. The human drive for creativity isn't limited to geniuses or specialists - it's hardwired into all of us. From the constant evolution of hairstyles and fashion to the development of life-saving technologies, our species demonstrates an insatiable appetite for novelty. We quickly adapt to new innovations, and what once seemed miraculous soon becomes mundane. This perpetual cycle of creation and adaptation propels human progress forward at an ever-accelerating pace.

Chapter 2: Mental Tools: How We Bend, Break, and Blend Our World

When Steve Jobs unveiled the iPhone in 2007, he declared it would "reinvent the phone." The audience was mesmerized by this seemingly magical device that combined a communication tool, music player, and personal computer in one sleek package. The media hailed it as revolutionary, something that appeared to come from nowhere. But like all innovations, the iPhone didn't materialize from thin air - it emerged from a rich genealogy of previous technologies. Years before the iPhone, the Casio AT-550-7 wristwatch featured a touchscreen that allowed users to finger-swipe digits directly onto the watch face. In 1994, IBM's Simon smartphone included a stylus-operated touchscreen with basic apps for sending emails and faxes. By examining these predecessors, we can trace the evolutionary path that led to Jobs' "revolutionary" product. As technology historian Bill Buxton notes, innovations don't appear suddenly - they result from inventors "riffing on the best ideas of their heroes." Similarly, when Kane Kramer designed the first portable digital music player in 1979, it laid the groundwork for the iPod decades later. Though Kramer's device could only hold one song due to memory limitations, it established the concept that Apple would eventually perfect. As Jobs himself admitted: "Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn't really do it. They just saw something." So where do new ideas come from? Research reveals that human creativity operates through three fundamental cognitive operations: bending, breaking, and blending. Bending involves taking something familiar and twisting it into new forms - like Claude Monet painting the same cathedral in different lights or engineers developing a continuous-flow artificial heart that doesn't pulse like a natural one. Breaking involves fragmenting wholes into parts - like cubist paintings shattering visual perspective or engineers dividing continuous mobile coverage areas into "cells" for better service. Blending combines multiple sources - like mythological creatures merging human and animal features or scientists creating "spider-goats" that produce spider silk in their milk. These mental operations aren't just artistic techniques - they're the fundamental ways our brains process and transform information. Whether consciously or unconsciously, we're constantly bending, breaking, and blending the raw materials of our experience to generate new possibilities. This cognitive toolkit allows humans to take existing ideas and reshape them into innovations that change our world. The most powerful aspect of human creativity is that it's not limited to individual minds. Our social nature means we constantly share and build upon each other's ideas, creating a collective intelligence that far exceeds what any single person could achieve. This is why creativity accelerates in environments where people can freely exchange thoughts and inspirations - whether in Renaissance workshops, modern research labs, or digital communities.

Chapter 3: Cultural Containers: The Impact of Time and Place on Creativity

In seventeenth-century France, playwrights strictly followed Aristotle's three dramatic unities: a play should focus on one main plot, take place in a single location, and occur within a single day. Meanwhile, across the English Channel, Shakespeare freely ignored these conventions - his characters traveled between countries and his plots spanned weeks or months. In Japan during the same period, Noh drama presented an entirely different approach where characters could stand side by side yet not be in each other's presence. Three cultures, three radically different approaches to the same art form. This pattern repeats across all creative domains. French gardens of the eighteenth century featured rigid symmetry and manicured layouts, while English gardens of the same era embraced winding paths and seemingly wild growth. Classical European ballet emphasized graceful, effortless motion with emotionless faces, while Indian dance remained grounded with expressive facial movements and dramatic postures. Even scientific theories were received differently - Einstein's revolutionary ideas were embraced in America but dismissed as "Jewish science" by some German scientists during the Nazi era. These examples reveal a crucial truth about human creativity: while our cognitive tools of bending, breaking, and blending are universal, how we apply them is profoundly shaped by our cultural context. The innovations that resonate in one time and place may fall flat in another. As Joyce Carol Oates described it, creative work is a "massive, joyful experiment done with words and submitted to one's peers for judgment" - and those judgments are filtered through cultural lenses. Cultural context doesn't just influence how innovations are received - it also determines which possibilities we can even imagine. When Beethoven composed his revolutionary Grosse Fuge in the 1820s, audiences found it incomprehensible and the composer reluctantly replaced it with a more conventional finale. Yet a century later, as musical tastes evolved, the once-rejected piece was recognized as one of his greatest achievements. Similarly, Hemingway's sparse dialogue style would have seemed incomprehensibly bare to readers a century earlier, though he used the same basic vocabulary as his predecessors. This cultural conditioning creates a perpetual challenge for innovators: finding the sweet spot between familiarity and novelty. Stay too close to convention, and your ideas may be overlooked or quickly surpassed. Venture too far beyond cultural norms, and your innovations may be rejected outright. The history of creativity is littered with ideas that arrived too early or too late to find their audience - from universal languages like Esperanto to calendar reforms that never took hold. The search for universal standards of beauty or creativity has proven elusive. While some have proposed biological preferences for certain patterns or proportions, cross-cultural studies reveal that even basic visual perception varies widely between societies. What Western eyes see as optical illusions may appear perfectly accurate to indigenous peoples with different visual experiences. Music that sounds harmonious to one culture may seem discordant to another. Beauty isn't genetically predetermined - it's constantly redefined as we explore new creative territories.

Chapter 4: Creative Mindsets: Risk-Taking, Proliferation, and Breaking Good

In the late nineteenth century, Frank Sprague saw an opportunity to revolutionize the elevator industry with electric power. But real estate developers were reluctant to adopt his unproven technology over established hydraulic systems. Undeterred, Sprague negotiated a high-stakes contract for the Postal Telegraph Building in New York: he would receive no money upfront, and if his elevators failed to meet expectations, he would install hydraulic systems at his own expense. During the maiden ride, the elevator shot past the top floor and nearly crashed through the roof - but Sprague persisted, installing fail-safes and eventually delivering a working system that would transform urban architecture forever. This willingness to embrace risk is a hallmark of creative minds. Thomas Edison tested thousands of materials before finding the right filament for his light bulb. James Dyson created 5,127 prototypes over fifteen years before perfecting his bagless vacuum cleaner. As Dyson explained: "Each failure brought me closer to solving the problem." For mathematician Andrew Wiles, solving Fermat's Last Theorem meant working in secret for seven years, only to discover a critical error in his proof after announcing his success to the world. Rather than giving up, he spent another year fixing the flaw and finally conquered the 300-year-old mathematical challenge. Creative minds also proliferate options instead of settling for the first solution. When George Washington Carver addressed Congress in 1921 to advocate for peanut farming, he arrived with a staggering array of peanut-derived products: ice cream, dyes, candy bars, milk, flour, ink, face cream, and dozens more. Similarly, Picasso painted fifteen variations of Delacroix's Women of Algiers, twenty-seven of Manet's Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe, and fifty-eight of Velázquez's Las Meninas. Ernest Hemingway drafted forty-seven different endings for A Farewell to Arms before selecting the final version. Perhaps most counterintuitively, creative people "break good" - they're willing to dismantle and reimagine even successful creations. Philip Guston was a celebrated abstract expressionist in the 1950s, but he shocked the art world in 1970 by abandoning his successful style for grotesque figurative paintings. Critics savaged his new work, but within a decade, younger artists were citing Guston as their primary influence. Similarly, E.O. Wilson spent fifty years championing kin selection in evolutionary biology before reversing his position based on new evidence, despite fierce criticism from colleagues. This creative mindset - embracing risk, generating multiple options, and willingly breaking what already works - isn't limited to famous innovators. We all have the capacity to strengthen these mental habits. Leonardo da Vinci deliberately distrusted his first solutions to problems, suspecting they resulted from overlearned routines. By deliberately derailing ourselves from paths of least resistance, we can discover richer possibilities hidden in our neural networks. The brain remains plastic throughout life, with each new experience etching new pathways. A lifetime of creativity helps maintain this flexibility - when we reshape the world around us, we also remodel ourselves. By practicing these creative mindsets, we develop the mental agility needed to navigate an ever-changing future.

Chapter 5: Fostering Innovation: From Corporations to Classrooms

At Google's research division called X, engineers were developing Google Glass - a wearable computer in the form of eyeglasses. Rather than spending months perfecting a prototype, they assembled a crude mockup in just one day using a coat hanger, a low-cost projector, and a plastic sheet protector. They immediately took this rough model to shopping malls to gather public feedback. When users complained about weight distribution, the team quickly adjusted. Through rapid iteration between idea generation and real-world testing, they developed a working product in record time. This approach exemplifies how innovative companies operate: they proliferate options, test them quickly, and aren't afraid to discard what doesn't work. When pharmaceutical companies develop new drugs, they now use high-throughput screening to test thousands of chemical combinations simultaneously rather than one at a time. Companies like 3M and Google build idea generation directly into their business models - 3M expects a third of its sales to come from products developed in the last five years, while Google's 70/20/10 rule dedicates 10% of resources to brand new "moonshots." The most creative companies also embrace constant change. Building 20 at MIT was meant to be a temporary structure during World War II but remained standing for decades. Its makeshift nature - where researchers could knock down walls or drill holes in floors without permission - made it a "magical incubator" where groundbreaking innovations flourished. Similarly, companies that periodically reconfigure their workspaces, teams, and processes tend to maintain creative momentum better than those that settle into rigid routines. This same spirit of innovation can transform education. At Wheeler Elementary in Vermont, a failing school with only 17% of third-graders meeting state standards, teachers integrated arts into all subjects. Students measured angles in Kandinsky paintings, danced about plate tectonics, and created pottery for community events. Within a few years, two-thirds of third-graders met standards, disciplinary problems plummeted, and parent involvement soared. The once-struggling school became a destination campus. Effective creative education balances structure with freedom. Art teacher Lindsay Esola first teaches her fourth-graders to copy different artistic styles, then challenges them to create their own "Anything Apple" project combining techniques however they choose. This approach gives students precedents to build on without constraining their choices. Similarly, Rice University engineering students addressed infant mortality in developing countries by creating an IV drip regulator using a mousetrap mechanism - a solution that emerged from exploring multiple possibilities at different distances from conventional thinking. To cultivate creativity in students, educators must encourage risk-taking and proliferation of options. Psychologist Carol Dweck found that praising effort rather than achievement makes children more willing to tackle challenging problems. "Sandboxing" approaches allow students to experiment with multiple solutions before being graded. Open-ended challenges like designing a parachute for an egg or creating a "super-font" with maximally distinct letters teach students to navigate problems without predetermined answers. The arts play a crucial role in this education - not as a luxury, but as essential training in the cognitive tools of innovation. When robotics professor Robin Murphy found that humans had trouble relating to her lab's robots, she collaborated with a drama instructor to incorporate flying robots into a production of A Midsummer Night's Dream. The robots developed "body language" to convey emotions, making them more relatable. This fusion of arts and technology exemplifies how creative education prepares students for a future we can barely imagine.

Chapter 6: Future Creativity: Investing in Our Imaginative Potential

Recently, an international team announced plans to send tiny spacecraft to Alpha Centauri, our nearest star. Rather than building a single massive ship that would take thousands of years to arrive, they designed an armada of nanocraft with miniature sails. Giant Earth-based lasers will accelerate these tiny vessels to one-fifth the speed of light. Like a school of fish, not every craft will survive the journey, but enough should reach their destination to send back data. This creative approach - rethinking the very concept of interstellar travel - exemplifies how human imagination continues to expand our horizons. Our species stands at the threshold of a creativity explosion unlike anything in history. For Renaissance painters attempting to depict lions, their raw materials were severely limited - they had never seen actual lions and could only copy other artists' interpretations, which grew increasingly distorted. Today, we have unprecedented access to information, with digital storage preserving vast libraries of human knowledge and creation. Global collaboration transcends political boundaries, with scientists from countries in conflict working together on projects like the Large Hadron Collider. The internet has eliminated distance as a barrier to sharing ideas, allowing creative communities to form across continents. Yet despite these advantages, we often operate within a "closed-world assumption" similar to digital assistants like Siri - imagining that our current knowledge represents the boundaries of what's possible. We struggle to envision how radically different the future might be. Just as our grandparents couldn't have imagined smartphones or gene therapy, we can barely conceive of the self-driving cars that might transform into mobile offices or living rooms, or the biological monitoring systems that could reroute those vehicles to hospitals during medical emergencies. What keeps creativity advancing despite these limitations? The arts and sciences continually push us beyond our mental borders, allowing us to peer over the fence of today into the vistas of tomorrow. Science fiction writers imagine technologies decades before they become reality. Artists create alternate worlds that expand our sense of the possible. These creative explorations leak the future into our present, preparing us for changes we can't yet fully comprehend. To harness this potential, we must invest in imagination at every level of society. Creative education shouldn't be a luxury reserved for affluent schools - it's essential preparation for a rapidly changing world. Throughout history, we've squandered creative capital by denying education to large portions of humanity based on gender, race, or social class. As anthropologist Margaret Mead noted, "We run a great risk of squandering half of our human gifts by arbitrarily denying any field to either sex." The more seeds we plant and nurture across all communities, the more bountiful our harvest of human imagination will be. The future being shaped today will likely stagger us with its innovations. Just as no one could have predicted that a "naked version of an ape" would come to dominate the planet, we cannot foresee exactly where our creative drive will take us. But we know that the ingredients for tomorrow's breakthroughs are all around us, waiting to be bent, broken, and blended in ways we haven't yet imagined. By investing in our creative potential - in classrooms, companies, and communities worldwide - we ensure that the story of human innovation continues to unfold in ever more remarkable chapters.

Summary

The human capacity for creativity sets us apart from all other species on Earth. Our brains are uniquely designed to absorb the world around us and transform it into something new - whether it's NASA engineers fashioning a life-saving air filter from spare parts, Picasso revolutionizing art with Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, or countless everyday innovations that shape our modern lives. This creative drive isn't limited to geniuses or specialists; it's hardwired into all of us through three fundamental cognitive operations: bending (transforming what exists), breaking (fragmenting wholes into parts), and blending (combining multiple sources). What makes this creativity so powerful is its social dimension. We don't just create in isolation - we share our innovations, build upon each other's ideas, and collectively push the boundaries of what's possible. Though our creative output is shaped by cultural context and historical moment, the underlying drive to reimagine our world remains constant. By cultivating creative mindsets - proliferating options, taking risks, and willingly "breaking good" - we can strengthen our innovative capacities. In a world changing at an accelerating pace, investing in creativity isn't a luxury but a necessity, from corporate boardrooms to elementary classrooms. The future belongs to those who can imagine it differently, who can bend, break, and blend the raw materials of today into the breakthroughs of tomorrow.

About Author

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David Eagleman

David Eagleman is an internationally bestselling author, a TED speaker, and a Guggenheim Fellow. He teaches neuroscience at Stanford University and is CEO of a neurotech startup, Neosensory. At night he writes. His books have been translated into 33 languages.

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