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Douglas H. Erwin, "The Origins of the New: Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life, Culture, and Technology" (Princeton UP, 2026)
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci, an associate professor of political science at Amherst College. Today I'm here with Dr. Douglas Irwin, who is an independent researcher at the Santa Fe Institute after retiring as senior scientist and curator of paleobiology at the National Museum of Natural History of the Smithsonian Institution. Dr. Irwin's new book is called the Origins of the Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life, Culture, and Technology. It was published in 2026 by Princeton University Press. Professor Irwin, thank you for joining us and welcome.
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It's a pleasure to join you.
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Professor Irwin, your book the Origins of the New tackles deceptively simple question where do new things come from? What drew you to that question?
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In a sense, it's a question I've been interested in since I was an undergraduate at Colgate. My senior thesis was on the Cambrian Explosion, the origin of animals, and that continued through my graduate career. And it's one of the the things I've been puzzling about most of my career. And this book is really an expansion of that question that was focused initially on what happens with the origin of animals, what happens after mass extinctions, and expands it to look more broadly at novelty and innovation, not only in the history of life but also in culture and technology.
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C
Wow. So that question was with you for a while, since undergrad.
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I like big, unsolvable questions. You never run out of things to do because this question is one that you can make progress on scientifically, but it's also one that, in a sense, you never find an answer. The answer isn't 42, because it's an ongoing problem. There are new approaches. There's new ways of looking at things. So it's one of those huge unsolvable problems.
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C
So this is the perfect segue for the next question. Right at the start of the book, you draw a distinction that, on paper, sounds simple but turns out to be very deep. The difference between novelty and innovation. You use as an example a turtle's shell. Can you walk us through that?
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Sure. So the shell of a turtle is a wonderful evolutionary novelty, because what happened in the origin of turtles is that the carapace encloses the carapace, which is the hard part of the turtle, encloses the legs and the arms of the turtle within this carapace. And that means that unlike every other vertebrate, the legs are sort of tucked inside the ribs and everything else. And so that's a wonderful question. How did turtles evolve? Turtles are a wonderful group of animals. We all love them. But the problem of how turtles appeared, how that set of novelties that created the turtle carapace, how that originated, turns out to be different from how turtles became successful. Most evolutionary biologists still stick to a view of what's called adaptive radiations, ideas that were generated in the middle part of the last century, particularly by a paleontologist named George K. Lord. Simpson and other evolutionary biologists like Ernst Meyer also talked about adaptive radiations. And this is the idea that some key evolutionary novelty originated, and then the group diversifies and becomes ecologically or evolutionarily successful. So in an adaptive radiation model, there's a close connection between the novelty and the evolutionary success. But now we know that's actually not what happens. There are many. There's much evidence from the fossil record of lags between the origin of some novelty and when the group becomes successful. Beyond turtles, one of the other great examples, grasses. Grasses are obviously enormously successful. Grasslands cover North America, Africa, the southern part of South America, huge parts of Asia. Grasses were a great evolutionary success, but there's a long lag between the origin of grasses and. And when they become ecologically successful, a lag of tens of millions of years. And if those lags are common, that means we need to separate the origin of some evolutionary novelty. Grasses or turtles from when they become successful. Those are two different problems. Now, it may turn out that in a particular case they're closely linked. A novelty leads directly to an innovation. But that's a question we have to address rather than assume. And in past evolutionary views, this adaptive radiation model has assumed a close connection between a novelty and what I call an innovation.
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C
You just now were talking about the adaptive radiation model and some of it false, if I may use that word. And indeed in the book, you walk readers through the history of thinking about novelty and you go from Darwin to modern biology. What did earlier thinkers get right and what did they miss?
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That's a great question that occupies chapters two and three of the book are really about sort of past ways of looking into this problem. I think the argument that I try and develop in the book is not necessarily that people were wrong, but that people are looking at different parts of this problem rather than looking at the whole problem and in some cases making assumptions about what else is going on. Even today, most developmental biologists, people who study developing plants and animals, believe their problem is sort of to figure out how novelties arose. They don't have to worry about whether or not they become successful. That's someone else's problem. Similarly, most evolutionary biologists take the novelties as given, given by the developmental biologists, in a sense, and they don't have to worry about where they are originated from. They have to. They worry about how they become successful. And by looking at both sides of that problem, I try and develop this argument that we need to separate novelty from innovation. But if we look historically, people were looking at different parts of the problem. So from Darwin on through the middle part of the last century, there was this assumption that if there was an ecological need for grasses or for turtles or for something with big teeth that became a saber toothed cat, that there would be enough variation present in a population to eventually produce a saber toothed tiger. And that was essentially the argument that Darwin made. That was the argument that was made by Ernst Meyer and a number of other people in the middle part of the last century, that variation is abundant enough and produced by mutation sufficiently quickly that we don't really need to worry about the origin of the variation, that variation is going to happen and if the ecological opportunity is present, so it's the opportunity that we have to focus on. We don't have to worry about the other problem. But with studies for the last 30 years in developmental biology, with lots of new techniques, our understanding of how this variation is produced has become a lot more sophisticated. And with that sophistication has come an appreciation that variation doesn't just produce what you need. It's sort of like thinking, well, we need artificial intelligence, so it's just going to appear. Well, artificial intelligence could have appeared at any time in human history. It happens to be appearing now. But there's a reason why it's appearing now. And that's part of what we're interested in, is why that opportunity arose. So in these two chapters, I go through about seven sort of basic different approaches. And what I outline is that some of them are really addressing the problem of novelty and others are really addressing the problem of innovation. And what we need to do is look at both sides of that equation.
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So this is, I take you to say that some people there was sort of a non productive, unproductive division of labor. Some people, some approaches were looking at novelty, others were looking at innovation. And in this book you explained to us how we should actually think about both to better understand innovation each, which I think it's very much on brand for your approach, because in addition to talking about biology, you also bring in ideas from economics and culture, which are fields that we think of as separate, usually from biology. So tell us, why is it useful to think about innovation across all these very different domains?
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So there are several answers to that question. The first is that this distinction between novelty and innovation that I've been talking about I really borrowed from an economist named Joseph Schumpeter who was at Austria. He was the finance minister in Austria for about nine months before he was thrown out because he was a complete failure as being a finance minister. He eventually became professor of economics at Harvard, where he was very good at that. And he produced a whole slew of very top notch Nobel economists, including two people who won the Nobel Prize in economics. But Schepter was interested in what was called entrepreneurship, and he realized that an invention of some new technology didn't necessarily become successful. And what he was interested in was whether or not an invention became successful. And so he distinguished between invention and innovation in economics and in technology. And historians of technology continue to distinguish between those two today. And I happen to have read about Schumpeter and realized that that same distinction that was useful in economics and in the history of technology was also important in biology and culture. So that's sort of one reason why those are both discussed in the book. The other reason is that I've spent a lot of the last two and a half decades at the Santa Fe Institute here. In New Mexico. And there are a lot of people at the Santa Fe Institute who like theories of everything. They like simple, preferably mathematical, theories that can address a whole host of questions, from biology to culture to technology. And some of these, some of them are very good friends. Many of them have training in physics, but they like to reduce complex problems, if they can, to simple mathematical formalisms. And in a sense, his book is an inquiry into whether that's even possible, whether this problem of novelty and innovation across biology, culture, and technology is amenable to some sort of grand theory of novelty and innovation and what that might look like. So that was why I didn't just look at biology, but wanted to look at culture and technology as well.
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C
That sounds very interesting. And so far, you told us how this idea for the book came about. You told us what's in chapters two and three, like, how you think about what came before in biology and why you brought in the study of culture and economics. Let's dig deeper into the argument itself. A central contribution of your book is this four phase model. Potentiation, novelty, refinement, and finally, innovation. Can you walk us through this process?
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B
Sure. So one of the other things that's come out, not just of my work, but the work of a whole lot of people over the last couple of decades, is that in many cases, now that we have a better understanding of the developmental and genetic underpinnings of evolutionary novelties, it turns out this will apply to culture as well. The earliest phases of a novelty often require some previous event. So if we think about, for example, the evolution of language required not only changes in the brain, but also changes in the structure of the vocal cords and a variety of other things. If we look, I'll take one of my favorite examples is the origin of vertebrates that have what we call what are called tetrapods. They have four limbs. We have forelimbs and hind limbs, and we came from fish. The genes that regulate that process of development to create forelimbs, to create a tetrapod, are actually deeply buried within the evolution of fish. So these genes evolved long before the first fish started growing limbs. So there's this. The evolutionary novelty of four limbs required these previous genetic changes that happened tens of millions of years earlier. So if you look at the history of fish, it turns out that there are many different lineages of fish that could have turned into tetrapods. Only one lineage did, the group that we call ichthyostegids back in the Devinian and the Carboniferous. So there's only One lineage that took this potentiation and made a novelty out of it. But recognizing that there are these prior potentiating events turns out to be really critical to understanding that a novelty isn't a one off. Oftentimes there are many different lineages that could have acquired the novelty but didn't. And that means that that's an interesting historical question itself. Why did this lineage acquire the novelty and these other three lineages didn't? So that's potentiation. Novelties on are the term novelty has been used in many, many different ways by all sorts of people. And because of that, it's very confusing when people say novelty. We actually had a meeting here at SFI about a decade ago in which the organizers of the meeting said on the first day that we were not allowed to even talk about what we meant by novelty or innovation, and that it was a complete disaster, because that meant that people were talking about all sorts of different things. And it was like it was this complete Tower of Babel that was a disaster. So I'm very specific in this book about what I mean by a novelty. And that's tied to some issues in biology about the origin of what's called the character. And the carapace of a turtle that we talked about earlier is a novel character. And there are different ways those novelties can arise. Combination of different things or these sort of deep transformations like the origins of limbs or the origins of a turtle shell. But then once that novelty arises, it's not perfect. I mean, the first eyes weren't, you know, capable of detecting prey two miles away, like modern predatory birds can do. So there's a process of the usual evolutionary adaptive refinement that takes that initial novelty and refines it through a process of natural selection evolution to produce something that's really a more capable function, whatever that that function is. The first turtles that we find, actually about 70 miles north of where I am right now in New Mexico, as well as in China, were pretty lousy turtles. I mean, you know, they were a nice first step, and we can tell that, but they're not. They don't have everything working together. So there's this process of refinement that's required before this novelty may or may not become evolutionarily or ecologically successful. And that's when we really see these things in the fossil record. So with grasses that I mentioned a few moments ago, we can detect the origin of grasses back by about 50 million years ago. But if you look through the fossil record, because grasses produce these little bits of silica called the phytolith. Very careful studies, particularly by Carolyn Stromberg at University of Washington have shown that grasses are present, but they're essentially ecologically insignificant on the landscape. So in most fossil deposits that are that old, you wouldn't know grasses were there. But if you study very carefully, you can tell that they were present but very, very rare for 20 million years, then the innovation happens. And the reason for the innovation may be very different than the reason for the novelty. So that's why in this model I separate out potentiation from novelty, from refinement from innovation. Because I think we need to be very clear about what the questions are that we're asking and what the evidence is that we're generating. Are we really studying why animals or turtles or grasses became successful or are we studying why they arose in the first place?
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Okay, so there's being respective innovation and novelty, why they were successful, innovation.
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Let me give you a quick human example. So there are lots of people who want to publish articles in science and nature. So they, they claim they have the earliest evidence for hand axes or for fire or for whatever it is. And this is, you know, 10,000 years or 20,000 years before the, the next earliest example. Well, so when I look at those papers, my response is often, well, if there's a gap of 10,000 years between this hand axe and when hand axes became really successful, for example, I'm making this, this up as a, as an example, then what I'm looking at maybe is a one off origin of this kind of hand axe, but not these hand axes becoming widely used by some human group. And so that's an example where in culture, I think this distinction between novelty and innovation is just as important as it is in biology. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount.
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You apply this entire four step four phase model to human culture and human cultural history. Even so, you apply it to the origins of agriculture, of language, of institutions, of laws. Why do you think that the same conceptual engine that explains a turtle's shell can also explain, say, the invention of writing.
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So there are two answers to that. One is that I object to ideas about human exceptionalism in the sense that humans are interesting to a degree, but humans are also a biological species and we're subject to biological processes like any other species. So if you're interested in evolution Then you can look at these events that had happened in human history in the same way that we look at events that happened in the history of many other taxa, many other species. So I don't think we should just sort of unilaterally say that, oh, humans do things differently. So one of the things that I wanted to do in this book is look at the process of acquiring cumulative culture as humans have done, the process of acquiring technology, and see whether or not that is amenable to the same process that we understand in biology. And so one of the things that I look at, for example, is how writing is acquired or how institutions develop in culture. And I think culture, many aspects of culture have the same process of potentiation of novelty and of innovation that we see within biology. I don't know whether or not archeologists or sociologists or historians are going to sort of buy that argument is we'll have to see what happens. But in a sense, by the end of the book, I'm coming back to where I started with Schumpeter. And Schumpeter in looking at technology was making this distinction between novelty and innovation. So it's not that hard to see that. I'm trying to draw the same thread through the book and use this four phase model that we've talked about.
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Yes. So tell us what determines this is the a question. I don't know if you agree with me, but I think it's a question for sure that is at the center of the book. What determines whether a novelty becomes an innovation?
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You're absolutely right. That's a key question of the book. I'm not completely sure I've solved that. One of the other issues that I have been very interested in for the last decade or so is the role of contingency. And Steve Gould talked about this in his book Wonderful Life, where you argue that contingency is an important part of the history of life. And certainly sociologists, historians have all talked about contingency in many ways for decades. And unlike the adaptive variation model, the way I look at innovation is that the innovation is often contingent upon the environmental or cultural or technological context in which something happens. So a wonderful example of this is this great mechanism, this analog computer that was discovered in the early 1900s off of Greece, called the Antikythera mechanism. I'm sure I've completely garbled the Greek, but this is a bronze device. It's actually technically called an orrery for calculating the position of the planets, the timing of the Greek games. It's basically Sort of an analog computer. But that was a. It clearly isn't the only one that ever was constructed by the ancient Greeks. But there was no. Until 1903, there was no knowledge in Greek archaeology that this thing existed. But it's there. It had to have some previous history. It can't have been the only one that ever existed. But there's no record of them in ancient Greece at all. And there's nothing like it for another almost 2,000 years. So that's a wonderful example of how these sort of mechanisms can arise, but then not be successful. So that, that raises a couple of questions. Why is it, and this is one for the scholars of ancient Greece, why is it that A, the ancient Greeks could build this thing technologically and then why did they forget about it? Why did it disappear? And why was it, you know, two millennia before the same technology would be rediscovered and then was incredibly successful? So I think those were contingent phenomena that depend upon the environment, culturally, economically, technologically, or biologically, that allow a novelty that's already present to. To become successful and take over. And, and that's, you know, why. Why the conditions are then right for the innovation to become successful is a, you know, really interesting set of questions, but there, I don't think there's a general answer to that problem. I think it's a specific contingent set of phenomena for this particular event.
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C
But you also have a very sort of a very interesting, very precise definition of innovation, which I'm sure plays a part in what brings about innovations. You define innovation not just as success, but as a restructuring of entire systems or networks. What does that mean?
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B
So success is a shorthand for what you've just described as this restructuring of networks. Because in order to become successful, any of these novelties that I discuss in the book have to find a way of making a living, in a sense, as a way of making a living. Maybe a technology or maybe an organism. Whatever it is, they have to be able to succeed and persist for a long amount of time. And novelties can arise in an environment in which they just for one reason or another, can't be successful. And often that success comes about by restructuring a network. So if you think about a food web, the web of interactions between species, and, you know, A eats B and B eats C or whatever. If an organism doesn't have a role within those networks, it may persist, but it may not become successful until either an external event, climate change or an extinction or something like that may provide an opportunity or it may create an opportunity. So let me Give you a sort of fun example. Mangrove swamps have been around for 15 or 20 million years. And Mangrove swamps, yeah, so they're in shallow water environments and subtropical environments like Florida and the southern margins of, of the US and mangroves exist sort of on the margin between the ocean and land. And they put their roots down into the sediment and they stabilize lagoons and seagrass beds and things like that. They prevent hurricanes, but they produce this really foul smelling anoxic mud. And there's a bunch of bivalves that love living in that mud. And they're very diverse in mangrove swamps today. But those clams, those bivalves actually originated 400 million years ago and they persist at very low abundance and low diversity for 400 million years. And then mangrove swamps evolve and they go hooray. And now, you know, you go all around the world, these mangrove swamps have these little bivalves in them. They produce lots of species and lots of genera, but that there's this very 400 million year long sews that then leads to this eruption when the environment, when the opportunity is created. So the bivalves didn't do anything. They were just hanging out, doing their thing. And then mangroves started producing these anoxic, low oxygen, foul smelling muds that these bivalves happen to love because they're what are called chemosynthetic. So they have bacteria in them that synthesize the things that the bivalves need. So that opportunity to become a innovation wasn't present. And the food web couldn't be restructured until these mangroves appeared for completely different reasons. So they only have contingency and opportunity, which creates the conditions for an innovation to occur.
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C
I'll never look at mangrove the same way after the conversation. Thank you for explaining. That's quite the story. In your epilogue, you talk about the importance of, importance of creating opportunity spaces. End quote for innovation. What does that mean in practical terms?
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So one of the early chapters is actually about the topology of the spaces in which we can think about evolution occurring. The simplest example is something like a chessboard or a Rubik's cube, which is a space of different possibilities. And evolution is. Many people have described evolution as a search through opportunities. So if you just think about a chessboard, if you're playing chess, you have a bunch of different opportunities. Some of those opportunities are going to be more successful than others. And if you find the right opportunities, you're more likely to win the game than your opponent is. And that process of search is true in many ways. But what I argue is that novelties and innovations often are not just about search within an existing chessboard. They're about the creation of the chessboard. So how do you build the space? How is the space created within which evolution can occur? And often that space is created by these novels, these innovation events. And that means building a new opportunity space, which you can think of in a simple way as a chessboard, rather than just searching what already existed. And I think for lots of parts of evolution, it turns out to be very helpful to distinguish between just searching some already existing space and creating a new one. So if we can go back to that Greek antikythera mechanism, that event in ancient Greece created this little opportunity space, but it advanced. They didn't capitalize on it. Obviously, there was enough of a space to build this very sophisticated mechanism, but that vanished for two millennia until it was similar kind of opportunity space was rediscovered. And that led to astrolabs and sextants and a whole lot of other things, and eventually into very sophisticated analog computers and then eventually into digital computers. But so the search mechanism, this sort of search conceptual idea would suggest that, oh, that space was created by the ancient Greeks. And all Steve Jobs did when he invented the first Apple Computer was go searching through this existing space. Well, that's a. That's not a helpful way of understanding the evolution of computers. If you want to understand, you know, the history of digital computers, you. You have to place them in the context of the latter part of the 20th century. Economically, culturally, there are a whole host of things that led to the first mainframe computers that led to Steve Jobs sitting in his garage with the homebrew computer club and coming up with the initial Apple computers and the whole digital revolution. So we have to look at that, you know, how that process originally happened. And that's the. I think, and I argue in the book, that that's about the creation of these opportunity spaces, not just a process of search, but the nature of these spaces actually turns out to be a fairly. A fairly hard problem. It involves a lot of topology and mathematics about what are called complex manifolds and things like that. So it becomes a fairly tough problem, actually, to understand at a deep level what the structure of these faces are.
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C
But you say in the book that the creation of these opportunity spaces, in a way depends heavily on public goods and basic research. Why are those so important?
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B
So public goods are things like mathematics. The fact that I'm doing mathematics doesn't impede you from doing. We can both do calculus at the same time. That's what's called the public good. The hard part about a public good is that it's really hard to make money off them. So Newton and Leibniz, whoever it was that invented calculus, could not have patented calculus. They couldn't have said, no, no, no, you can't do calculus. We can only do calculus at Trinity College at Cambridge. Nobody else can do calculus. That's not the way ideas work. And ideas wind up being the underpinning of a lot of technology. And also a lot of biological innovations are also turn out to be a public good. Oxygen is a public good. The fact that plants are producing oxygen that goes out and changes the chemistry of the environment is not something that can be controlled easily. And as Joel Moiker has brilliantly pointed out in a series of books, as have a number of other economists, underpinning a lot of technological innovation are public goods. Because public goods are something that it's hard to patent, it's hard to make money off of. That means that they're the sort of thing that we need governments to provide. Governments provide other public goods. They provide road systems, they provide the fire department, they provide a lot of other things. And our societies ultimately are built on the foundation of these public goods. And certainly not a novel observation in the book, but scientific research similarly is a public good. It may lead or it may not lead, but it may lead at some point to something that a new company or old company can produce a patent off of. But the reason why AT&T had Bell Labs was to produce in many cases these public goods. And because of the structure of corporations when Bell Labs was at its apogee, you know, they can, they can capitalize on what these goods were that were produced by Bell Labs, but some of them were capitalized on by other companies because the Bell companies didn't see what the value was. But ultimately, it's these public goods that are the foundation of economic growth. But they're not things that we can rely upon private enterprise to produce. Because of their very nature.
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C
They don't make money out of it. Yeah. So going from governments and their roles to individuals. For listeners thinking about creativity, what lessons can they take from your book?
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B
I hope that one of the lessons that readers might find intriguing is these. The idea about creation of these opportunity spaces and how creativity, the most interesting and deepest forms of creativity, are about creating these new. Generating these new opportunity spaces. And that can be true in music. If you look at the history of music, whether you're interested in Elvis Presley and the Beatles or Beethoven, a lot of that, a lot of what the people that we look at as innovators, as highly creative individuals, what they have done is created entirely new art forms, new forms of music. Other people then start playing with the same idea. But the true innovations are often not just a combination of what already exists, but going off in a very new direction to create some new opportunity. I think one of the interesting questions about artificial intelligence now is whether that's really going to be a recombination of having sucked everything that's in the web, most of which I think is apparently CAD videos and just rearranging that, or whether there's actually some new opportunity that's an outcome of that kind of a process. I don't have the answer to that question yet, but I think ultimately it's thinking about these new spaces that that is something I hope readers will take away from the book.
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C
That's a great message for everybody. We've taken enough of your time today. One last question. What are you working on next?
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B
Partly finishing all the things that I didn't get done while I was writing the book, which is what always happens with these. But I'm also very interested in some broader issues in evolution. I'm interested in a problem of something called slow variables, when you have things changing at different speeds. Forests have trees that may last for hundreds of thousands of years, as well as animals that are turning over at much faster speeds. Resilience often comes from the slow variables. And I've. I've been interested in that issue. So, as usual, there are lots of sort of broad evolutionary projects that I'm interested in.
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C
This is great. If a book comes out, you must come back.
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B
I certainly will.
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C
Great. Thank you so much, Dr. Irwin, for taking the time to talk with us today. My guest has been Professor Irwin. He's the author of a new book, the Origins of the Novelty and Innovation in the History of Life, Culture and Technology. The book was published in 2026 by Princeton University Press. I'm your host, Eleonora Matiacci. Until next.