The World Is Full of Sleeping Beauties

Grass, mammals, penicillin, John Keats. None was successful right away.

Grasses struggled along in patches here and there for some 45 million years before, rather quickly, unfurling, almost blanketlike, across the continents. Mammals, as we know, were furry blurs underground and underfoot for more than 100 million years before ascending to prominence—and then dominance. The life-saving drug penicillin was abandoned by its discoverer and lay mostly neglected for more than a decade before it was ever administered to a single patient. And now-revered Romantic poet John Keats sold just a couple hundred volumes of his poetry in his life—only entering the canon decades after his death.

In fact, many lasting innovations, whether biological or cultural, were no overnight success. Instead, they emerged and managed to persist, in the shadows, until the time was just right for them to step into the limelight.

You may have produced something wonderful but it’s just not the right place and time. 

So argues biologist Andreas Wagner in his new book, Sleeping Beauties: The Mystery of Dormant Innovations in Nature and. Wagner, a professor at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, and a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, came to biology not as a boy fascinated by newts or lichens, but as a teenager enchanted by the prospect of uncovering principles that guide the natural world. In the lab, Wagner has pioneered models of gene networks. In the author’s chair, he has probed the puzzling natures and .