Irreducibly Quotes & Sayings

To me, good health is more than just exercise and diet. Its really a point of view and a mental attitude you have about yourself. — Albert Schweitzer

While most people became irritable when hungry, a redheaded person with an empty stomach was a walking time bomb. — Diana Gabaldon

If a functional gene becomes a pseudogene, its product will no longer be available to the biochemical pathways in which it formerly participated. The transformation of a gene to a pseudogene will not have catastrophic consequences if the biochemical pathways in which its product formerly participated are redundantly complex - other products can take over the role of the missing product. Perhaps not as efficiently, but efficiency is something that can be improved by selection. In this way, redundant scaffolding can be reduced, ultimately to the point where a system or pathway is irreducibly complex. — Niall Shanks

As the number of unexplained, irreducibly complex biological systems increases, our confidence that Darwin's criterion of failure has been met skyrockets toward the maximum that science allows. — Michael Behe

fiction is about prizing the logic of metaphors - which is the logic of narratives in general - over reality, which is irreducibly random and senseless. — Ken Liu

The question of what kind of a thing a text or poem is now becomes a function neither of what the poet might have intended by its words nor of what the conventions of grammar and meaning might seem to require of them, but rather of the reader's irreducibly subjective experience in her encounter with those words. — Jennifer Ashton

The ultimate reality from which the path of this becoming could start off again will no longer rest on a ground of 'causa sui.' in any case the sense of a God who would alone be capable of giving an account of self. It is rather from the human and from what the human most irreducibly is that it is a question of starting off again. From the human as it objectively is before it starts to construct a language and a thinking which help to distance it from its beginning, from its prematureness without thinking it in the totality of its being. — Luce Irigaray

It is not at all coincidental that Darwinian psychology has the same difficulty explaining the unity and integration of human reasoning as Darwinian biology has explaining the unity and integration of irreducibly complex functions. Practical and theoretical reasoning is often irreducibly complex. A given argument has several well-matched, interacting reasons, and the removal of any one of them makes the argument break down. — Angus J.L. Menuge

Everything is but what we think it. — Marcus Aurelius

A free-standing arch of rough-hewn stones and no mortar can be a stable structure, but it is irreducibly complex: it collapses if any one stone is removed. How, then, was it built in the first place? One way is to pile a solid heap of stones, then carefully remove stones one by one. More generally, there are many structures that are irreducible in the sense that they cannot survive the subtraction of any part, but which were built with the aid of scaffolding that was subsequently subtracted and is no longer visible. Once the structure is completed, the scaffolding can be removed safely and the structure remains standing. In evolution, too, the organ or structure you are looking at may have had scaffolding in an ancestor which has since been removed. 'Irreducible — Richard Dawkins

A lot of the music editing job is communication and working out what a director really wants the music to be. — Steven Price

God does not care what good you did, but why you did it. He does not grade the fruit but probes the core and tests the root. — Angelus Silesius

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on. — Michael Behe

By irreducibly complex I mean a single system composed of several well-matched, interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, wherein the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning. — Michael Behe

I've been actually really very pleased to see how much awareness was raised around bullying, and how deeply it affects everyone. You know, you don't have to be the loser kid in high school to be bullied. Bullying and being picked on comes in so many different forms. — Lady Gaga

It's hard to explain," said Brutha. "But I think it's got something to do with how people should behave ... you should do things because they're right. Not because gods say so. They might say something different another time. — Terry Pratchett

One realizes that everything about the world that seems so unexceptional and drearily predictable is in fact charged with an immense and imponderable mystery. In that instant one is aware, even if the precise formulation eludes one, that everything one knows exists in an irreducibly gratuitous way: "what it is" has no logical connection with the reality "that it is"; nothing within experience has any "right" to be, any power to give itself existence, any apparent "why." The world is unable to provide any account of its own actuality, and yet there it is all the same. In that instant one recalls that one's every encounter with the world has always been an encounter with an enigma that no merely physical explanation can resolve. One cannot dwell indefinitely — David Bentley Hart

We chart delusions through collective agreement. — Siri Hustvedt

Certainly I was a bully. I'm not ashamed of it at all. The hostility of the establishment to what you were able to do in the Forties and Fifties was very strong. Sometimes you have to fight against your society. — Pierre Boulez

Perfection is an admirable thing to strive for. But so is knowing when to stop. — Richelle Mead

What she had believed was indignation or rage or a deep intolerance for injustice came down to this: she was irreducibly in love with this bewitching planet, this thrilling life, this heartbreaking species she belonged to, with its capacity for stupefying destruction and breathtaking magnanimity. — Thrity Umrigar

I used to think like Moses. That knocked me down for a couple years and put me in prison. Then I start thinking like Job. Job waited and became the wealthiest and richest man ever 'cause he believed in God. — James Brown

Changing a college curriculum is like moving a graveyard-you never know how many friends the dead have until you try to move them! — Calvin Coolidge

Talk to her, goddamnit. She ain't a stick of furniture. She is one of God's creatures, and she will hear you. I see these goddamned people walkin' dogs, yakking on their phones, makes me wanna kick their sissy asses. What they got a dog for, they want to talk on their phones? That dog there will understand you, Officer James. She will understand what's in your heart. Am I just shouting at the grass and dog shit out here, or are you reading what I am telling you? — Robert Crais

I have mended fences with both my sisters. But do I have their families on my side? Not easily. My one sister, Florence, has two lawyers in the family and two doctors. Of course, I couldn't win that battle. — Manuel Moroun

Israel worshipped a God who could grow angry, who changed his mind, a God involved in history, who cared so much about one group of people that their apostasies drove him to fits of impatience. The greatest philosophers of Greece spoke of an unchanging divine principle, far removed from our world, without emotion, unaffected by anything beyond itself. Improbably enough, Christian theology came to identify these two as the same God; this may be the single most remarkable thing to have happened in Western intellectual history. — William C. Placher

Culture is concerned with the world of values. All cultures are irreducibly value-oriented. — Henry R. Van Til

Molecular machines display a key signature or hallmark of design, namely, irreducible complexity. In all irreducibly complex systems in which the cause of the system is known by experience or observation, intelligent design or engineering played a role in the origin of the system ... We find such systems within living organisms. — Scott A. Minnich