# Where did Charles Darwin's ideas come from?

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Charles Darwin has described in his autobiography how his theory on natural selection was inspired and broken through.

"In October 1838, fifteen months after I had begun my systematic study, I happened to pick up Malthus's Theory of Population while I was reading for my own amusement, and I found the great drama of survival and competition playing out in every corner of the world.

It then occurred to me that in such situations, favorable mutations tend to survive, while organisms that do not have a dominant position in the environment are eliminated. The end result of this process is the formation of new species.

It was at that moment that my new theory could finally begin."

Another Alfred Russel Wallace arrived at some theories of natural selection at almost the same time without knowing Darwin's theory.

Interestingly, he also emphasized afterwards that his theoretical breakthrough was inspired by Malthus.

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It is important to read a lot of books in different fields to expand one's information, and Steven Johnson, author of Where Good Ideas Come From, emphasizes that innovation requires one's brain to exchange a lot with the outside world, creating many new neural connections and forming a network that systematically contributes to innovation.

In a famous 1922 Columbia University study (Are Inventions Inevitable), which summarized hundreds of innovations, they found that a large number of innovations had the phenomenon of independent repetition (the multiple), i.e., an important invention had an "independent repetition" in the course of its history. After a scientist's discovery is made public, it may be discovered that someone somewhere on the planet has made the discovery completely independently.

This is no accident, because innovation requires first knowing what has happened in the past and the components available, so it is important to learn about past history and major discoveries. Innovation also requires putting together available components like Lego, trying to create new connections to old components.