Quotes About Living systems

It has taken about four billion years for living systems, mostly in the sea, to transform the lifeless ingredients of early Earth into the Eden that makes our lives possible, and less than a century for us to destabilize those rhythms.

When we fail to harmonize and integrate, living systems, from individuals to families and countries, tend to move toward either chaos or rigidity.

1962 that "No data processing system, whether artificial or living, can process more than 2 × 1047 bits per second per gram of its mass," which means that a hypothetical supercomputer the size of the earth (= c. 6 × 1027 grams) grinding away for as long as the earth has existed (= about 1010 years, with c. 3.14 × 107 seconds/year) can have processed at most 2.56 × 2092 bits, which number is known as Bremermann's Limit.

As a biologist, Piaget considered cognitive development to be part of a much more general tendency of living systems to grow, change, improve and maintain themselves.

It's recently been discovered that actual living systems such as photosynthetic bacteria in plants are using funky quantum weirdness techniques to make energy transport in plants and bacteria be much, much more efficient. It was kind of a drag because, you know, we discovered all these cool quantum techniques, and then we found out, whoa, these bacteria have been doing it for a billion years! Well, they didn't publish, so it's okay.

Living systems are actually very close to this edge-of-chaos phase transition, where things are much looser and more fluid. And natural selection is not the antagonist of self-organization.