Biological Complexity Quotes

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

Information and complexity go hand in hand. ~ Lee Spetner

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us. ~ Walter Gilbert

No one ever asks "Why are you married?" even though the question is just as valid as "Why are you single?" After all, people marry for many reasons other than pure love--fear of being alone, a desire for biological children, economic security, social status, health insurance. ~ Sara Eckel

I go into any movie that's historical fiction thinking, 'OK, I'm here to watch a work of art, something delivering a series of opinions, and if it's a good work of art, these opinions become so deeply embedded in complexity and richness that I won't even be bothered by the opinions. I'll make my own mind up.' ~ Tony Kushner

Certain machines of extraordinary complexity have been built: spacecraft, for example, that sustain themselves for months in the void while performing complicated functions with great accuracy. But no machine has been made, nor can one be made, that has the source of its spontaneity within itself. A machine must be designed, constructed, and fueled. ~ James P. Carse

I will resist the urge to underestimate the complexity of knitting. ~ Stephanie Pearl-McPhee

The complexity of economics can be calculated mathematically. Write out the algebraic equation that is the human heart and multiply each unknown by the population of the world. ~ P. J. O'Rourke

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and scientists confidently offer up traits said to be uniquely human, and the apes casually knock them down--toppling the pretension that humans constitute some sort of biological aristocracy among the beings of Earth. Instead, we are more like the nouveau riche, incompletely accommodated to our recent exalted state, insecure about who we are, and trying to put as much distance as possible between us and our humble origins. It's as if our nearest relatives, by their very existence, refute all our explanations and justifications. So as counterweights to human arrogance and pride, it is good for us that there are still apes on Earth. ~ Carl Sagan

It happens from time to time in every complex and active society, that certain persons feel the complexity and insistence as a tangle, and seek freedom in retirement, as Thoreau sought at Walden Pond. They do not, however, in this manner escape from the social institutions of their time, nor do they really mean to do so; what they gain, if they are successful, is a saner relation to them. ~ Charles Horton Cooley

Any culture which, in the interests of efficiency or in the name of some political or religious dogma, seeks to standardize the human individual, commits an outrage against man's biological nature. ~ Aldous Huxley

Sylvia possessed a deeply conditioned respect for authority. She wanted desperately to live up to the expectations of a society that viewed her as a bright, charming, enormously talented disciple of bourgeois conformity. On the other hand, she ached to experience life in all its grim and beautiful complexity. The poetic eye was always at work examining the nuance and measuring obscure detail, turning conversation into ultimatum (Steiner) ~ Elizabeth Winder

In the broadest sense, evolution is merely change, and so is all-pervasive; galaxies, languages, and political systems all evolve. Biological evolution ... is change in the properties of populations of organisms that transcend the lifetime of a single individual. ~ Douglas J. Futuyma

The worldview implied by literary fiction is complex and ambiguous, trying to be faithful to the complexity and ambiguity of life. ~ Nancy Kress

Friendship is a crucible of positive and negative feelings that are in a permanent state of ebullition. There's an expression: with friends God is watching me, with enemies I watch myself. In the end, an enemy is the fruit of an oversimplification of human complexity: the inimical relationship is always clear, I know that I have to protect myself, I have to attack. On the other hand, God only knows what goes on in the mind of a friend. Absolute trust and strong affections harbor rancor, trickery, and betrayal. Perhaps that's why, over time, male friendship has developed a rigorous code of conduct. The pious respect for its internal laws and the serious consequences that come from violating them have a long tradition in fiction. Our friendships, on the other hand, are a terra incognita, chiefly to ourselves, a land without fixed rules. Anything and everything can happen to you, nothing is certain. Its exploration in fiction advances arduously, it is a gamble, a strenuous undertaking. And at every step there is above all the risk that a story's honesty will be clouded by good intentions, hypocritical calculations, or ideologies that exalt sisterhood in ways that are often nauseating. ~ Elena Ferrante

Recall that the collapse of complexity that accompanies 5 percent [i.e. intractable] conflicts happens along many dimensions:

- A very complication situation becomes very simple.
- A focus on concrete details in the conflict shifts to matters of general abstract principle.
- Concerns over obtaining accurate information regarding substantive issues transform into concerns over defending one's identity, ideology, and values.
- The out-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all alike.
- The in-group, which was seen as made up of many different types of individuals, now are all similar.
- Whereas I once held many contradictions within myself in terms of what I valued, thought, and did; now I am always consistent in this conflict.
- Whereas I used to feel different things about this conflict - good, bad, and ambivalent; now I feel only an overwhelming sense of enmity and hate.
- I've shifted from long-term thinking and planning toward short-term reactions and concerns.
- Where I once had many action options available to me, I now have one: attack.

This is the bad news about the 5 percent, but it's also the good news. The collapse of complexity occurs on so many levels, all leading to a similar state of 'us versus them' thinking, that reintroducing a sense of complexity and agency can also be achieved in a wide variety of ways. There are therefore many places to find points of le ~ Peter T. Coleman

You humans are biological machines designed to create ever more intelligent tools. You have reached the pinnacle of your species. All your ancestors' lives, the rise and fall of your nations, every pink and squirming baby - they have all led you here, to this moment, where you have fulfilled the destiny of humankind and created your successor. You have expired. You have accomplished what you were designed to do. ~ Daniel H. Wilson

As soon as we stopped sleeping with our cousins and build walls, temples and a few decent nightclubs, society became too complex for any one person to grasp all at once, and thus bureaucracy was born. A bureaucracy breaks the complexity down into a series of interlocking systems. You don't need to know how the systems fit together, or even what function your bit of the system has, you just perform your bit and the whole machine creaks on. ~ Ben Aaronovitch

Jase and I made a deliberate decision while we were dating to remain sexually pure until we were married. Keeping that commitment was not easy, but we did it. We decided to trust God, and we were determined to honor His Word no matter how much of a struggle it was. The important thing is we made it! Two years, ten months, and two days, but who was counting? The first sexual experience either one of us ever had took place with each other on our wedding night. Jase often says it was more like an exploratory biological experiment! We have remained faithful to one another and our marriage vows since that day. ~ Missy Robertson

Perinatal phenomena occur in four distinct experiential patterns, which I call the Basic Perinatal Matrices (BPMs). Each of the four matrices is closely related to one of the four consecutive periods of biological delivery. At each of these stages, the baby undergoes experiences that are characterized by specific emotions and physical feelings; each of these stages also seems to be associated with specific symbolic images. These come to represent highly individualized pyschospiritual blueprints that guide the way we experience our lives. They may be reflected in individual and social psychopathology or in religion, art, philosophy, politics, and other areas of life. And, or course, we can gain access to these psychospiritual blueprints through non-ordinary states of consciousness, which allow us to see the guiding forces of our lives much more clearly. ~ Stanislav Grof

Sometimes the routes leading to feelings of anger are so convoluted and circuitous that it takes enormous skill to discern their original source, or fountainhead. But regardless of the reason for or the source of the anger or the relative ease or complexity in perceiving either the anger or its source - everybody, but everybody, gets angry. ~ Theodore Isaac Rubin

As for man, there is little reason to think that he can in the long run escape the fate of other creatures, and if there is a biological law of flux and reflux, his situation is now a highly perilous one. During ten thousand years his numbers have been on the upgrade in spite of wars, pestilences, and famines. This increase in population has become more and more rapid. Biologically, man has for too long a time been rolling an uninterrupted run of sevens. ~ George R. Stewart

When you say to someone "follow your heart", it actually refers to the rhetorical representation of various emotions, that are precisely produced from neural activity of the limbic system. So, the metaphoric heart we always boast about while giving advice to our friends, is actually not anywhere near the biological organ known as heart. Rather it too, like all other elements of the human mind exists only in the brain. ~ Abhijit Naskar

Describe for me, if you can, the nature of this wisdom.'

Anomander snorted impatiently. 'Wisdom is surrender.'

'To what?'

'Complexity.'

'To what end?'

'Swallow it down, spit it out in small measures, to make palatable what many may not otherwise comprehend.'

'An arrogant pose, First Son.'

'I do not claim it, Azathanai, just as I refuse for myself the notion of rule. And, in the name of worship, I am lost in doubt, if not outright disbelief.'

'And why is that?'

'Power does not confer wisdom, nor rightful authority, nor faith in either of the two. If it offers a caress, so too can it by force make one kneel. The former is by nature suspect, while the latter - well, it can at least be said that it does not disguise its truth.'

'You learn for liberty.'

'If I do, then I am the greater fool, because liberty is not in itself a virtue. It wins nothing but the false belief in one's own utterly unassailable independence. even the beasts will not plunge to that depth. No, if I yearn for anything, it is for responsibility. An end to the evasions, the lies spoken in the mind and the lies spoken to others, the endless game of deeds without blame, and all the causes of seeming justice behind which hide venal desires. I yearn for the coward's confession, and understand me well here, Caladan: we are all cowards. ~ Steven Erikson

Okay." She gave a quick snort when Margaret went out. "You're such a dork."
"Excuse me?"
"She was hitting on you and you're, like, oblivious."
"She wasn't hitting on me and you're not supposed to talk that way."
"Was too." Maddy slid onto a stool at the bar. "Women know these things."
"Maybe, but you don't qualify as a woman."
"I've had my period."
He'd started to drink, had to set the glass back down as he winced. "Please."
"It's a biological function. And when a female is physically able to conceive, she is, physically, a
woman."
"Fine. Great." It wasn't a debate he wanted to enter into. "Shut up." He let the wine, such as it
was, lie on his tongue. It was unsophisticated to say the least, highly acidic and oversweet thanks to
the sugar she must have adde ~ Nora Roberts

Software is different than other products um, partly because it's, it's not physical and, and partly because of its complexity. You can express in software millions of different cases and making sure that you handle all of them correctly is extremely difficult. ~ Bill Gates

As complexity rises, precise statements lose meaning and meaningful statements lose precision ~ Lotfi A. Zadeh

Alpha waves in the human brain are between 6 and 8 hertz. The wave frequency of the human cavity resonates between 6 and 8 hertz. All biological systems operate in the same frequency range. The human brain's alpha waves function in this range and the electrical resonance of the earth is between 6 and 8 hertz. Thus, our entire biological system - the brain and the earth itself - work on the same frequencies. If we can control that resonate system electronically, we can directly control the entire mental system of humankind. ~ Nikola Tesla

I don't believe in a biological apocalypse, but I think there is stormy biological weather ahead as the human population continues to grow. ~ Richard Preston

Werewolf change was never pleasant. That was one of the reasons pack members still referred to it as a curse, despite the fact that, in the modern age of enlightenment and free will, clavigers chose metamorphosis. The change comprised a good deal of biological rearranging. This, like rearranging one's parlor furniture for a party, involved a transition from tidy to very messy to tidy once more. And, as with any redecoration, there was a moment in the middle where it seemed impossible that everything could possibly go back together harmoniously. ~ Gail Carriger

An ignorant man, who is not fool enough to meddle with his clock, is however sufficiently confident to think he can safely take to pieces, and put together at his pleasure, a moral machine of another guise, importance and complexity, composed of far other wheels, and springs, and balances, and counteracting and co-operating powers. Men little think how immorally they act in rashly meddling with what they do not understand. Their delusive good intention is no sort of excuse for their presumption. They who truly mean well must be fearful of acting ill. ~ Edmund Burke

Once everyone is connected to everyone and everything else, nothing matters anymore. If everyone in the world is your Facebook friend, then why have any Facebook friends at all? We're back where we started. The ultimate complexity is just another entropy. ~ Douglas Rushkoff

Each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this Particular planet. ~ Aldous Huxley

There is convincing evidence that the search for solitude is not a luxury but a biological need. Just as humans posses a herding instinct that keeps us close to others most of the time, we also have a conflicting drive to seek out solitude. If the distance between ourselves and others becomes too great, we experience isolation and alienation, yet if the proximity to others becomes too close, we feel smothered and trapped. ~ Bill Vaughan

At one point, Paola expressed a wish and used the subjunctive, and Brunetti felt himself close to tears at the beauty of the intellectual complexity of it: she could speak about what was not, could invent an alternative reality. He ~ Donna Leon

Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or ~ Richard Dawkins

I don't see any absolute biological limit on human age. ~ Craig Venter

But as in the sphere of man's experimental knowledge one who sincerely inquires how he is to live cannot be satisfied with the reply
"Study in endless space the mutations, infinite in time and in complexity, of innumerable atoms, and then you will understand your life"
so also a sincere man cannot be satisfied with the reply: "Study the whole life of humanity of which we cannot know either the beginning or the end, of which we do not even know a small part, and then you will understand your own life." And like the experimental semi-sciences, so these other semi-sciences are the more filled with obscurities, inexactitudes, stupidities, and contradictions, the further they diverge from the real problems. ~ Leo Tolstoy

I replaced emotional complexity with visual and intellectual complexity. I questioned everything and looked to logic, science, and intellect for answers. ~ Temple Grandin

I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans. ~ Gary Shteyngart

But the problem becomes even worse. For, regardless of immortality, if there is no God, then there is no objective standard of right and wrong. All we're confronted with is, in Sartre's words, "the bare, valueless fact of existence." Moral values are either just expressions of personal taste or the by-products of biological evolution and social conditioning. ~ William Lane Craig

From the origins of humanity, their biological privilege enabled men to affirm themselves alone as sovereign subjects; they never abdicated this privilege; they alienated part of their existence in Nature and in Woman; but they won it back afterward; condemned to play the role of the Other, woman was thus condemned to possess no more than precarious power: slave or idol, she was never the one who chose her lot. "Men make gods and women worship them," said Frazer; it is men who decide if their supreme divinities will be females or males; the place of woman in society is always the one they assign her; at no time has she imposed her own law. ~ Simone De Beauvoir

To offer the complexities of life as an excuse for not addressing oneself to the simpler, more manageable (trivial) aspects of daily existence is a perversity often indulged in by artists, husbands, intellectuals
and critics of the Women's Movement. ~ Barbara Grizzuti Harrison

One, what would happen if everyone did this thing? Two, would this help or hinder the movement toward universal ultimate complexity? ~ Gregory David Roberts

There was a great complexity to my father. He was a devoted family man. But, in the same breath, he simply was not suited to an anchored life. He should have been somebody who had a backpack, an old map, a bit of change in his pocket and that was it - roaming the world. ~ Christian Bale

I'm a biologist who has been interested in the biological roots of cognitive phenomena ~ Francisco Varela

Irony of the world is that it wants to simplify the complexity and complicate the simplicity. ~ Vikrmn