Biological Complexity Quotes & Sayings

Information and complexity go hand in hand. — Lee Spetner

When a livestock farmer is willing to "practice complexity" - to choreograph the symbiosis of several different animals, each of which has been allowed to behave and eat as it evolved to - he will find he has little need for machinery, fertilizer, and, most strikingly, chemicals. He finds he has no sanitation problem or any of the diseases that result from raising a single animal in a crowded monoculture and then feeding it things it wasn't designed to eat. This is perhaps the greatest efficiency of a farm treated as a biological system: health. — Michael Pollan

Peopl change, but the thing is, they don't. Not all the way through. — Mary McCoy

When you play against top players, sometimes you can play - you can play your utmost and you still get beat. — Tim Howard

However, we have the benefits of the billions of years of evolution that have already taken place, which are responsible for the greatly increased order of complexity in the natural world. We can now benefit from it by using our evolved tools to reverse engineer the products of biological evolution (most importantly, the human brain). — Ray Kurzweil

In my personal life, I am very contemplative. — Antonio Banderas

The cold view to take of our future is that we are therefore headed for extinction in a universe of impersonal chemical, physical, and biological laws. A more productive, certainly more engaging view, is that we have the intelligence to grasp what is happening, the composure not to be intimidated by its complexity, and the courage to take steps that may bear no fruit in our lifetimes. — Barry Lopez

With biological and neurological complexity entirely new families of affectionate fears, devoted threats and dedicated displeasures are birthed, and then with socioeconomic and cultural complexity comes a fresh ocean of new and unique illnesses. — John Zande

We are not sure we are right until we have made the best case possible for those who are wrong. — Lord Acton

Common sense says that the amazing complexity of life cannot arise out of a random process. The neo-Darwinians use clever arguments to show why evolution should work and why common sense is wrong. One after the other of them has explained that although the variability occurs randomly, the selection process gives it direction and makes it nonrandom ... if the arguments were solid and correct they should have put the theory on a stable and reliable foundation. The neo-Darwinians would like everyone to believe they have done that. — Lee Spetner

Hierarchical organization in biological systems thus is characterized by an exquisite array of delicately and intricately interlocked order, steadily increasing in level and complexity and thereby giving rise neogenetically to emergent properties. — Clifford Grobstein

Love is a flower that should never cease to grow. Nurture it, and it will outlive you. Neglect it, and it will wilt away and die. — Suzy Kassem

Biology doesn't know in advance what the end product will be; there's no Stuffit Compressor to convert a human being into a genome. But the genome itself is very much akin to a compression scheme, a terrifically efficient description of how to build something of great complexity-perhaps more efficient than anything yet developed in the labs of computer scientists (never mind the complexities of the brain, there are trillions of cells in the rest of the body, and they are all supervised by the same 30,000-gene genome). And although there is no counterpart in nature to a program that compresses a picture into a compact description, there is a natural counterpart to the program that decompresses the compressed encoding, and that's the cell. Genome in, organism out. Through the logic of gene expression, cells are self-regulating factories that translate genomes into biological structure. — Gary F. Marcus

We are encouraged to see honest people as naive, as potential losers. — Bell Hooks

To be human is to be in the tense condition of a death-foreseeing, consciously libidinous animal. No other earthly creature suffers such a capacity for thought, such a complexity of envisioned but frustrated possibilities, such a troubling ability to question the tribal and biological imperatives. — John Updike

Almost everybody understands that you have to have something at stake for a story to be good. — Diana Gabaldon

We have multiple sex maps - form genetic and epigenetic influences that are largely out of our consciousness to social and cultural influences that may or may not be within our awareness. We are a social and biological species with sexual patterns and tendencies that exist independent of any religion. Religion attempts to force sex into a one-size-fits-all box, placing a layer of complexity on sexuality that is neither realistic nor related to the biological roots of our species. — Darrel Ray

Near me nothing but distances. — Antonio Porchia

Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership. Under socialism, government officials acquire all the advantages of ownership, without any of the responsibilities, since they do not hold title to the property, but merely the right to use it
at least until the next purge. In either case, the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens. — Ayn Rand

Recall the metaphor I used in chapter 4 relating the random movements of molecules in a gas to the random movements of evolutionary change. Molecules in a gas move randomly with no apparent sense of direction. Despite this, virtually every molecule in a gas in a beaker, given sufficient time, will leave the beaker. I noted that this provides a perspective on an important question concerning the evolution of intelligence. Like molecules in a gas, evolutionary changes also move every which way with no apparent direction. Yet we nonetheless see a movement toward greater complexity and greater intelligence, indeed to evolution's supreme achievement of evolving a neocortex capable of hierarchical thinking. So we are able to gain an insight
into how an apparently purposeless and directionless process can achieve an apparently purposeful result in one field (biological evolution) by looking at another field (thermodynamics). — Ray Kurzweil

Geneticists experienced a comparable shock when, contrary to their expectations of over 120,000 genes, they found that the entire human genome consists of approximately 25,000 genes. (Pennisi 2003a and 2003b; Pearson 2003; Goodman 2003) More than eighty percent of the presumed and required DNA does not exist! The missing genes are proving to be more troublesome than the missing eighteen minutes of the Nixon tapes. The one-gene, one-protein concept was a fundamental tenet of genetic determinism. Now that the Human Genome Project has toppled the one-gene for one-protein concept, our current theories of how life works have to be scrapped. No longer is it possible to believe that genetic engineers can, with relative ease, fix all our biological dilemmas. There are simply not enough genes to account for the complexity of human life or of human disease. — Bruce H. Lipton

The mechanist is intimately convinced that a precise knowledge of the chemical constitution, structure, and properties of the various organelles of a cell will solve biological problems. This will come in a few centuries. For the time being, the biologist has to face such concepts as orienting forces or morphogenetic fields. Owing to the scarcity of chemical data and to the complexity of life, and despite the progresses of biochemistry, the biologist is still threatened with vertigo. — Andre Michel Lwoff

I finally became convinced that the theory of creation actually had a much better scientific basis than the theory of evolution, for the creation model was actually better able to explain the physical and biological complexity in the world ... — Roy Spencer