IELTS CAM Inspired 17 - Reading Test 2 with Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
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IELTS Mock Test 17 - Reading Test 2 With Practice Test, Answers And Explanation
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 1
Question 1 - 5
Complete the notes below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
The Dead Sea Scrolls
Discovery — Wadi Harun, 1952
• two young Bedouin herders were leading their camels down a dry valley
• one of them threw a
1.
through a narrow opening and heard something break inside
• once inside the
2.
, they discovered several jars that were still sealed
• the jars had been made from
3.
The scrolls
• date from about 100 BCE to 68 CE
• thought to be the work of a devout group called the
4.
• the language of most of the texts was
5.
• most deal with religious subjects, set down in ink on parchment or papyrus
Question 6 - 13
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the Reading Passage?
TRUE if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this
6
Experts, and not only local people, were involved in retrieving fragments from the caves.
7
The trader who acquired the scrolls understood their true value.
8
The people left the site because enemy forces overran it.
9
In the surrounding area, Nabataean was spoken more widely than Aramaic was.
10
The Book of Ruth is among the scriptural works represented in the collection.
11
It has been suggested that metal was used so the text would survive longer than other writing materials.
12
Father Nikolaos found British universities willing to purchase the scrolls he offered.
13
The scroll read in 2019 refers to ceremonies that were held once a year.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 2
Question 14 - 18
Reading Passage 2 has 5 sections, A-E.
Which section contains the following information?
Write the correct letter, A-E.
14
mention of a tomato variety able to withstand a harmful disease
15
an account of the drawbacks of breeding only from one selected plant
16
several instances of currently uncultivated species that might serve as future foods
17
a contrast between how long ancient and modern methods each took to tame the tomato
18
one researcher's own impression of how an edited tomato tastes
Question 19 - 23
Match each statement with the correct researcher, A-D.
List of Findings
A
Rupert Ashworth
B
Marisol Ferreira
C
Anders Melheim
D
Wenjie Tan
19
Beginning with wild plants could yield crops suited to the conditions of a changing climate.
20
Persuading people to grow and eat unfamiliar plants on a wide scale may prove difficult.
21
It would be unwise to disclose which species a research programme intends to work on next.
22
Efforts to turn one wild fruit into a crop are being held back by expense.
23
Only a tiny fraction of the world's edible plants is actually used by people.
Question 24 - 26
Complete the sentences below.
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.
24
In its wild form the tomato holds about double the amount of the pigment
found in cultivated types.
25
Editing one gene allowed the team to quadruple the
of every fruit.
26
The Chinese team produced a tomato that resists
and also carries extra vitamin C.
Passage
❓ Câu hỏi passage 3
Question 27 - 31
Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.
Write the correct letter in boxes on your answer sheet.
27
In the first paragraph, the writers primarily aim to
A
show why one theory is mistaken.
B
describe an assumption that is widely shared.
C
weigh up two rival explanations.
D
argue in favour of a particular position.
28
In the second paragraph, the writers are
A
restating a claim they made earlier.
B
conceding that the popular view is correct.
C
taking issue with a widely held view.
D
illustrating their point with an example.
29
In the third paragraph, the writers imply that Newton and Curie
A
worked in a way that has been misinterpreted.
B
ought to be admired more than they currently are.
C
provide a model that other scientists should follow.
D
are unlike most of those who bring about innovation.
30
The example of Casimir Wende is used to describe someone whose idea
A
gave another researcher the starting point for an important breakthrough.
B
was accepted only long after his death.
C
earned him a reputation as a leading figure of his time.
D
was at first met with doubt by other scientists.
31
What most interests the writers about the 'sunk-elbow' crouch is
A
how rapidly other riders took it up.
B
how much study went into developing it.
C
the unremarkable reason it came about.
D
the cleverness of the man who first used it.
Question 32 - 36
Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage?
YES if the statement agrees with the information
NO if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this
32
Calling figures such as Aristotle or Michelangelo geniuses adds nothing to our understanding of how their ideas came about.
33
The Rule of Consequences, in the writers' view, is aimed at reaching a particular outcome.
34
Ferran put forward the Rule of Consequences in order to account for how creativity happens.
35
The new ideas a person comes up with may be shaped by what has succeeded or failed before.
36
The writers conclude that the notion of genius is, for now, worth keeping.
Question 37 - 40
Complete the summary using the list of words, A-G, below.
Write the correct letter, A-G, in boxes on your answer sheet.
The origins of creative behaviour
On the traditional account, a scientific breakthrough arrives when one exceptional mind is struck by a sudden . This does sometimes happen, but it is the exception rather than the rule. More often, an advance emerges from a drawn-out process. Sometimes that process turns on , as in Wende's proposal about seed-particles. At other times plain necessity is enough to prompt something new, as when Kessler was forced to alter the way he positioned himself on the bike. Frequently, too, an element of plays its part — witness the chance meeting of two problems that produced the thaw-indicator label. In neither natural selection nor the Rule of Consequences need there be any clear ; there is only a cycle of variation and selection.
A
revelation
B
trials
C
fortune
D
discovery
E
intention
F
adjustment
G
errors
DOL IELTS Đình Lực
21/10/2026
📖 Bài đọc passage 1
The Dead Sea Scrolls
During the spring of 1952, two Bedouin brothers were driving their camels through a dry ravine called Wadi Harun, on the south-eastern shore of the Dead Sea in what is today Jordan. Chasing a stray animal, the younger brother flung a pebble through a gap in the cliff face and, to his astonishment, heard pottery breaking somewhere inside. Squeezing into the cavern beyond, the pair came upon a row of sealed ceramic jars, five of which held rolled documents covered in dense script. The brothers carried these five scrolls back to their camp and, weeks later, parted with them for a trifling sum to a passing trader. As news spread, both Bedouin and trained archaeologists recovered many thousands more fragments from eight neighbouring caves, enough to account for between 400 and 500 separate manuscripts. Before long, scholars were calling it one of the most remarkable finds in the history of archaeology.
Exactly who produced the scrolls, which have been dated to a span between roughly 100 BCE and 68 CE, remains a matter that scholars continue to argue over. The explanation most widely favoured holds that they were the handiwork of a community which occupied the site until a violent earthquake forced its abandonment at some point around 68 CE. In that era the surrounding district went by the name of Zalmon, and its inhabitants are generally identified with the Harethites, an austere and deeply religious sect.
Most of what is written on the scrolls is in Aramaic, though a handful of fragments employ an archaic form of the script that specialists believe had passed out of everyday use by the fourth century BCE. Other tongues appear too. A number of passages are set down in Nabataean, widely spoken across the region until the early centuries of the common era, and a further group of texts consists of Greek renderings of older sacred writings.
Among the manuscripts are portions of almost every book belonging to the community's scriptural canon, the single exception being the Book of Ruth. Just one work survives in its entirety: a complete copy of the Book of Psalms, assigned to the second century BCE and now regarded as the oldest surviving version of that text anywhere. Beside these scriptural pieces sit documents of a quite different character, codes governing the life of the sect, together with hymns and prayers that form no part of any established canon.
The lettering on the scrolls was applied mostly in black ink, with red used here and there, and the writing surface is in nearly every case either parchment, made from animal hide, or the early paper-like material called papyrus. A lone exception is the document catalogued as 7Q4. Rather than skin or papyrus, its text was punched into a thin sheet of silver, which is why it is called the Silver Scroll, beaten into metal, some suggest, so that it might outlast any parchment. It ranks among the strangest of the Wadi Harun finds: a kind of ancient inventory of buried wealth. Written in a peculiar vocabulary and riddled with irregular spellings, it lists forty-seven concealed sites said to hold valuables put away for protection. Not one of these caches has ever been found, perhaps because raiders swept through the district in the century that followed. Scholars have variously proposed that the riches belonged to the sect itself, that they had been spirited from a temple before its ruin, or that they were pure invention and never existed at all.
A few of the scrolls have had eventful histories. In 1953 a Greek Orthodox abbot named Father Nikolaos obtained three of the five original scrolls from a carpenter in Amman who dealt in antiquities on the side, handing over less than fifty pounds for them. He then sailed to Britain, where he tried without success to interest a series of universities, Oxford among them, in the purchase. At last, in 1956, he took out a notice in a London financial paper, filed under the heading Antiques and Collectables, which announced: Ancient manuscripts, no younger than 100 B.C., available to a suitable buyer; a fitting donation to any scholarly or religious foundation. In the end it was the archaeologist Farid Haddad who arranged for the scrolls to be bought and carried back to Amman, where they have stayed ever since.
In 2019, a team at Zarqa University succeeded in restoring and reading one of the few scrolls that had until then defied translation. Two of its members, Layla Nasser and Tomas Berg, gave some eighteen months to fitting back together the forty fragments into which the scroll had crumbled. Once the coded lines on the parchment had been unpicked, they opened a window onto the community that had composed them and onto the 354-day calendar by which it appears to have lived. The scroll lists festivals that mark the turning of the seasons and sets out three yearly observances already familiar from a second scroll found at the site. As things stand, two further scrolls await translation.
A. The tomato on our plates began as a straggly plant from the Andes of South America, and in the wild it still bears fruit no larger than a pea. Peoples such as the Inca and the Aztec reshaped it across countless generations, saving and breeding from any plant whose genetic make-up had shifted in a helpful direction, so that the fruit slowly grew bigger. This method carried a hidden penalty, though. Each time one favoured individual is lifted out of a larger population to parent the next crop, a share of that crop's genetic diversity vanishes for good. What is more, a welcome mutation often arrives in the company of an unwelcome one: the firm, even-looking tomatoes raised for today's supermarkets have given up much of the flavour their ancestors possessed.
B
Turning the wild tomato into a food crop took humans something like three thousand years. Two teams, one in Chile and one in China, have repeated the feat — each in under three years, and in some ways better, since their re-domesticated fruits are more nourishing than what we eat now. They began with comparison: by setting the genomes of modern plants beside those of their wild relatives, scientists had already worked out which genetic changes domestication involved. The teams then reintroduced those changes deliberately, from scratch, while keeping — and sometimes sharpening — the qualities that made the wild strains valuable. Everything depends on CRISPR, a genome-editing technique in which the DNA in a living cell is altered on purpose, so that genetic material can be added, taken out or exchanged. Its advocates believe it could achieve far more than fine-tuning familiar crops; it might turn thousands of untamed plants into food worth growing. A third group, in Canada, has already begun doing just that with a wild relative of the tomato. 'This could change our diet completely,' says Anders Melheim of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, who belongs to the Chilean team. 'Some 50,000 plant species are edible, and yet about nine-tenths of the energy we live on comes from just fifteen crops.' Wenjie Tan, of the Institute of Plant Molecular Biology in Shanghai, sets his sights further off: 'Now that we can copy the domestication route already followed by major crops — rice, maize, sorghum and so on — we can go on to tame plants that have never been domesticated at all.'
C
Melheim's group made several edits in total. By rewriting a gene they named PLUMP they made each tomato roughly four times its former weight, and by adjusting a second, which they called CLUSTER, they increased how many fruits each stalk would carry. Ordinary domestication had over the centuries lowered the tomato's lycopene level — the red pigment thought to offer possible health benefits — but the Chilean team drove it upward instead. A wild tomato already contains around twice the lycopene of a cultivated one; their newly built fruit contains roughly six times as much. Melheim is pleased with how they turned out. 'They taste rather good,' he says. 'Quite intense, and marvellously aromatic.'
D
D. The Chinese team went about things differently, giving back to several wild strains the useful qualities that everyday domestication had stripped out. One outcome was a line of tomatoes able to shrug off bacterial speck, a widespread disease capable of ruining much of a harvest. Another was a strain that copes far better with drought and, as a bonus, holds noticeably more vitamin C than usual.
E
Working the same way, Marisol Ferreira of the Boyd Institute in Ontario, Canada, set out to domesticate a plant never farmed before — a wild, husk-wrapped berry much like the Cape gooseberry. Berries of this kind already sell in modest amounts, but they are hard to grow: the plant sprawls untidily and its small fruits drop from the branches the moment they ripen. Ferreira's team has edited it to enlarge the berries, give the plant a more compact shape, and keep the ripe fruit from falling. 'There is a real chance this could become a commercial crop,' she says, though she warns that going further would be costly, given the licence fee CRISPR carries and the regulatory approval any new food must win. The method could bring many overlooked plants into wider use, says Rupert Ashworth of the Fenwick Crop Laboratory in Britain; even so, he doubts that many will ever win over farmers and shoppers fully enough to become staple foods. The three teams already eye other candidates for the mainstream — finger-millet, marsh-grass and the pigeon pea among them — and by starting with wild species that already tolerate heat or drought, Tan suggests, they could build crops that thrive even as the world warms. Melheim, though, would not name the species his own team was pursuing, precisely because CRISPR has made the work so easy. 'Anyone with the right skills could walk into their lab and do this.'
Two scientists consider where discoveries and other inventive behaviour really come from
Ask most people where scientific discovery comes from and they will point to the raw brilliance of figures like the physicist Isaac Newton or the chemist Marie Curie. This picture tends to leave out everything such a figure had learned beforehand, and the quieter work of the predecessors before them. Popular opinion leans heavily, too, on insight as the engine of every major advance, as though a fully formed, workable idea had simply materialised, unbidden, inside one gifted head.
That account is not wholly without merit. To our minds, though, it gives a badly distorted picture of how scientific discovery actually happens – and of how creativity and innovation unfold across a great many other areas of human life besides.
Newton and Curie, and the handful like them whose towering achievements deserve every bit of their acclaim, we would set aside. For everyone else, innovation looks far more like a business of trying things and getting them wrong: two paces forward tend to be followed by a pace back, and a sidestep or two besides. Seen this way – as something closer to evolution – human innovation no longer depends on the myth of the lone genius, and the piecemeal, accumulating character of scientific progress comes into view.
Take a scientist almost no one remembers: Casimir Wende, a mathematical physicist active in the 1900s, who proposed that space was pervaded by hypothetical 'seed-particles'. Assign these particles' atoms various combined weights, Wende found, and the weight of every element then listed in the periodic table could be reproduced. That he managed this is the more striking once you know he was mistaken – seed-particles are not real. Yet buried among his more far-fetched conjectures, Wende had also sketched an unfamiliar account of how the atom is built. It was from this stray idea that Greta Halvorsen, later revered as a founder of modern atomic theory, set out toward the model of the atom for which she is now remembered.
So what should we take from this? The easy reading is that science is a shared undertaking that builds on itself – fair enough, yet something more telling may lie underneath. Our suggestion is that science, like living things, is forever evolving. Just as an organism can show new traits thrown up by chance mutations in its genes, so the arbitrary, accidental reshaping of an idea can clear a path for science to advance. Should such a mutation prove helpful, the creature, or the theory, goes on flourishing, and may pass itself on.
This evolutionary reading of inventive behaviour finds backing in field after field. Competitive track cycling offers a telling case. The posture known as the 'sunk-elbow' crouch – in which a rider drops one forearm as much as 15 centimetres below the other – is reckoned to shave crucial fractions of a second off times through the banked turns of a velodrome. Its originator was an obscure racer named Bruno Kessler. Had Kessler run careful trials, or pored over hours of footage, cannily scheming to outpace his rivals? Had he foreseen the edge the crouch would give him? He had not. A shoulder injury had left him unable to lift his left arm properly, and the resulting stance simply happened to line up with quicker cornering. From there it spread fast among other riders, and remains part of track racing today.
No end of other tales confirm that progress can spring from blunders, mishaps and sheer luck – the happy accident. In the early 1980s, for instance, two staff at the firm Delford Industries were each stuck. Ines Halloran had devised a coating that shifted colour as it warmed, with no use for it; her colleague Theo Brandt was casting about for a way to reveal whether chilled medicines had grown too warm in transit. Both difficulties dissolved at once with the thaw-indicator label – plain, obvious even, and a runaway success. Such cases expose the hollowness of the belief that creativity and invention are the handiwork of clever, purposeful minds. Something far more ordinary and mechanical may be at work; something tied at root to the laws of science.
Words like insight, creativity and genius get much use, yet they stay hazy and of little scientific value – as becomes plain the moment one runs through the varied, lasting achievements of figures such as Aristotle, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Mozart, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur and Tesla. Such words do no more than put a name to the evolution of human innovation; they do not account for it. What is wanted is a different approach, and one likely contender is already at hand.
The Rule of Consequences was set out by the psychologist Matteo Ferran in 1902, a little over four decades after Charles Darwin brought out his landmark study of biological evolution, On the Origin of Species. What the rule says is straightforward: living things are inclined to do again whatever has worked for them, and to stop doing whatever has not. And exactly as with Darwin's principle of natural selection, it turns entirely on a mechanical cycle of variation and selection, with no final end anywhere in view.
None of this denies that the roots of human innovation need much more study. The source of the raw material the Rule of Consequences works upon, in particular, is understood far less clearly than the genetic mutations natural selection feeds on. The fresh ideas and behaviours thrown up may not be wholly random, but hemmed in by what has already worked or failed – whether for the individual at hand (a Halvorsen) or a predecessor (a Wende).
The moment looks ripe, then, to give up our naive faith in intelligent design and genius, and to turn the tools of science on where creative behaviour truly begins.
During the spring of 1952, two Bedouin brothers were driving their camels through a dry ravine called Wadi Harun, on the south-eastern shore of the Dead Sea in what is today Jordan. Chasing a stray animal, the younger brother flung a pebble through a gap in the cliff face and, to his astonishment, heard pottery breaking somewhere inside. Squeezing into the cavern beyond, the pair came upon a row of sealed ceramic jars, five of which held rolled documents covered in dense script. The brothers carried these five scrolls back to their camp and, weeks later, parted with them for a trifling sum to a passing trader. As news spread, both Bedouin and trained archaeologists recovered many thousands more fragments from eight neighbouring caves, enough to account for between 400 and 500 separate manuscripts. Before long, scholars were calling it one of the most remarkable finds in the history of archaeology.
Exactly who produced the scrolls, which have been dated to a span between roughly 100 BCE and 68 CE, remains a matter that scholars continue to argue over. The explanation most widely favoured holds that they were the handiwork of a community which occupied the site until a violent earthquake forced its abandonment at some point around 68 CE. In that era the surrounding district went by the name of Zalmon, and its inhabitants are generally identified with the Harethites, an austere and deeply religious sect.
Most of what is written on the scrolls is in Aramaic, though a handful of fragments employ an archaic form of the script that specialists believe had passed out of everyday use by the fourth century BCE. Other tongues appear too. A number of passages are set down in Nabataean, widely spoken across the region until the early centuries of the common era, and a further group of texts consists of Greek renderings of older sacred writings.
Among the manuscripts are portions of almost every book belonging to the community's scriptural canon, the single exception being the Book of Ruth. Just one work survives in its entirety: a complete copy of the Book of Psalms, assigned to the second century BCE and now regarded as the oldest surviving version of that text anywhere. Beside these scriptural pieces sit documents of a quite different character, codes governing the life of the sect, together with hymns and prayers that form no part of any established canon.
The lettering on the scrolls was applied mostly in black ink, with red used here and there, and the writing surface is in nearly every case either parchment, made from animal hide, or the early paper-like material called papyrus. A lone exception is the document catalogued as 7Q4. Rather than skin or papyrus, its text was punched into a thin sheet of silver, which is why it is called the Silver Scroll, beaten into metal, some suggest, so that it might outlast any parchment. It ranks among the strangest of the Wadi Harun finds: a kind of ancient inventory of buried wealth. Written in a peculiar vocabulary and riddled with irregular spellings, it lists forty-seven concealed sites said to hold valuables put away for protection. Not one of these caches has ever been found, perhaps because raiders swept through the district in the century that followed. Scholars have variously proposed that the riches belonged to the sect itself, that they had been spirited from a temple before its ruin, or that they were pure invention and never existed at all.
A few of the scrolls have had eventful histories. In 1953 a Greek Orthodox abbot named Father Nikolaos obtained three of the five original scrolls from a carpenter in Amman who dealt in antiquities on the side, handing over less than fifty pounds for them. He then sailed to Britain, where he tried without success to interest a series of universities, Oxford among them, in the purchase. At last, in 1956, he took out a notice in a London financial paper, filed under the heading Antiques and Collectables, which announced: Ancient manuscripts, no younger than 100 B.C., available to a suitable buyer; a fitting donation to any scholarly or religious foundation. In the end it was the archaeologist Farid Haddad who arranged for the scrolls to be bought and carried back to Amman, where they have stayed ever since.
In 2019, a team at Zarqa University succeeded in restoring and reading one of the few scrolls that had until then defied translation. Two of its members, Layla Nasser and Tomas Berg, gave some eighteen months to fitting back together the forty fragments into which the scroll had crumbled. Once the coded lines on the parchment had been unpicked, they opened a window onto the community that had composed them and onto the 354-day calendar by which it appears to have lived. The scroll lists festivals that mark the turning of the seasons and sets out three yearly observances already familiar from a second scroll found at the site. As things stand, two further scrolls await translation.
B. Turning the wild tomato into a food crop took humans something like three thousand years. Two teams, one in Chile and one in China, have repeated the feat — each in under three years, and in some ways better, since their re-domesticated fruits are more nourishing than what we eat now. They began with comparison: by setting the genomes of modern plants beside those of their wild relatives, scientists had already worked out which genetic changes domestication involved. The teams then reintroduced those changes deliberately, from scratch, while keeping — and sometimes sharpening — the qualities that made the wild strains valuable. Everything depends on CRISPR, a genome-editing technique in which the DNA in a living cell is altered on purpose, so that genetic material can be added, taken out or exchanged. Its advocates believe it could achieve far more than fine-tuning familiar crops; it might turn thousands of untamed plants into food worth growing. A third group, in Canada, has already begun doing just that with a wild relative of the tomato. 'This could change our diet completely,' says Anders Melheim of the University of Aarhus in Denmark, who belongs to the Chilean team. 'Some 50,000 plant species are edible, and yet about nine-tenths of the energy we live on comes from just fifteen crops.' Wenjie Tan, of the Institute of Plant Molecular Biology in Shanghai, sets his sights further off: 'Now that we can copy the domestication route already followed by major crops — rice, maize, sorghum and so on — we can go on to tame plants that have never been domesticated at all.'
C. Melheim's group made several edits in total. By rewriting a gene they named PLUMP they made each tomato roughly four times its former weight, and by adjusting a second, which they called CLUSTER, they increased how many fruits each stalk would carry. Ordinary domestication had over the centuries lowered the tomato's lycopene level — the red pigment thought to offer possible health benefits — but the Chilean team drove it upward instead. A wild tomato already contains around twice the lycopene of a cultivated one; their newly built fruit contains roughly six times as much. Melheim is pleased with how they turned out. 'They taste rather good,' he says. 'Quite intense, and marvellously aromatic.'
E. Working the same way, Marisol Ferreira of the Boyd Institute in Ontario, Canada, set out to domesticate a plant never farmed before — a wild, husk-wrapped berry much like the Cape gooseberry. Berries of this kind already sell in modest amounts, but they are hard to grow: the plant sprawls untidily and its small fruits drop from the branches the moment they ripen. Ferreira's team has edited it to enlarge the berries, give the plant a more compact shape, and keep the ripe fruit from falling. 'There is a real chance this could become a commercial crop,' she says, though she warns that going further would be costly, given the licence fee CRISPR carries and the regulatory approval any new food must win. The method could bring many overlooked plants into wider use, says Rupert Ashworth of the Fenwick Crop Laboratory in Britain; even so, he doubts that many will ever win over farmers and shoppers fully enough to become staple foods. The three teams already eye other candidates for the mainstream — finger-millet, marsh-grass and the pigeon pea among them — and by starting with wild species that already tolerate heat or drought, Tan suggests, they could build crops that thrive even as the world warms. Melheim, though, would not name the species his own team was pursuing, precisely because CRISPR has made the work so easy. 'Anyone with the right skills could walk into their lab and do this.'
Ask most people where scientific discovery comes from and they will point to the raw brilliance of figures like the physicist Isaac Newton or the chemist Marie Curie. This picture tends to leave out everything such a figure had learned beforehand, and the quieter work of the predecessors before them. Popular opinion leans heavily, too, on insight as the engine of every major advance, as though a fully formed, workable idea had simply materialised, unbidden, inside one gifted head.
That account is not wholly without merit. To our minds, though, it gives a badly distorted picture of how scientific discovery actually happens – and of how creativity and innovation unfold across a great many other areas of human life besides.
Newton and Curie, and the handful like them whose towering achievements deserve every bit of their acclaim, we would set aside. For everyone else, innovation looks far more like a business of trying things and getting them wrong: two paces forward tend to be followed by a pace back, and a sidestep or two besides. Seen this way – as something closer to evolution – human innovation no longer depends on the myth of the lone genius, and the piecemeal, accumulating character of scientific progress comes into view.
Take a scientist almost no one remembers: Casimir Wende, a mathematical physicist active in the 1900s, who proposed that space was pervaded by hypothetical 'seed-particles'. Assign these particles' atoms various combined weights, Wende found, and the weight of every element then listed in the periodic table could be reproduced. That he managed this is the more striking once you know he was mistaken – seed-particles are not real. Yet buried among his more far-fetched conjectures, Wende had also sketched an unfamiliar account of how the atom is built. It was from this stray idea that Greta Halvorsen, later revered as a founder of modern atomic theory, set out toward the model of the atom for which she is now remembered.
So what should we take from this? The easy reading is that science is a shared undertaking that builds on itself – fair enough, yet something more telling may lie underneath. Our suggestion is that science, like living things, is forever evolving. Just as an organism can show new traits thrown up by chance mutations in its genes, so the arbitrary, accidental reshaping of an idea can clear a path for science to advance. Should such a mutation prove helpful, the creature, or the theory, goes on flourishing, and may pass itself on.
This evolutionary reading of inventive behaviour finds backing in field after field. Competitive track cycling offers a telling case. The posture known as the 'sunk-elbow' crouch – in which a rider drops one forearm as much as 15 centimetres below the other – is reckoned to shave crucial fractions of a second off times through the banked turns of a velodrome. Its originator was an obscure racer named Bruno Kessler. Had Kessler run careful trials, or pored over hours of footage, cannily scheming to outpace his rivals? Had he foreseen the edge the crouch would give him? He had not. A shoulder injury had left him unable to lift his left arm properly, and the resulting stance simply happened to line up with quicker cornering. From there it spread fast among other riders, and remains part of track racing today.
No end of other tales confirm that progress can spring from blunders, mishaps and sheer luck – the happy accident. In the early 1980s, for instance, two staff at the firm Delford Industries were each stuck. Ines Halloran had devised a coating that shifted colour as it warmed, with no use for it; her colleague Theo Brandt was casting about for a way to reveal whether chilled medicines had grown too warm in transit. Both difficulties dissolved at once with the thaw-indicator label – plain, obvious even, and a runaway success. Such cases expose the hollowness of the belief that creativity and invention are the handiwork of clever, purposeful minds. Something far more ordinary and mechanical may be at work; something tied at root to the laws of science.
Words like insight, creativity and genius get much use, yet they stay hazy and of little scientific value – as becomes plain the moment one runs through the varied, lasting achievements of figures such as Aristotle, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Mozart, Faraday, Mendel, Pasteur and Tesla. Such words do no more than put a name to the evolution of human innovation; they do not account for it. What is wanted is a different approach, and one likely contender is already at hand.
The Rule of Consequences was set out by the psychologist Matteo Ferran in 1902, a little over four decades after Charles Darwin brought out his landmark study of biological evolution, On the Origin of Species. What the rule says is straightforward: living things are inclined to do again whatever has worked for them, and to stop doing whatever has not. And exactly as with Darwin's principle of natural selection, it turns entirely on a mechanical cycle of variation and selection, with no final end anywhere in view.
None of this denies that the roots of human innovation need much more study. The source of the raw material the Rule of Consequences works upon, in particular, is understood far less clearly than the genetic mutations natural selection feeds on. The fresh ideas and behaviours thrown up may not be wholly random, but hemmed in by what has already worked or failed – whether for the individual at hand (a Halvorsen) or a predecessor (a Wende).
The moment looks ripe, then, to give up our naive faith in intelligent design and genius, and to turn the tools of science on where creative behaviour truly begins.
