Idea quotes

kw: quotes, ideas

A few of the quotes I dogeared while reading Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson:

• "Good ideas are not conjured out of thin air; they are built out of a collection of existing parts, the composition of which expands (and, occasionally, contracts,) over time." -p35
• "…some scientists have argued that natural selection has gravitated toward a small but stable error rate in DNA transcoding, that evolution has, in a sense, "tuned" the error rate to the optimal balance between too much mutation and too much stability." -p144
• "…all decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilization between different disciplines." -Arthur Koestler, quoted on p159
• "There are good ideas, and then there are good ideas that make it easier to have other good ideas." -p243