Quotes About Complexity

18th century scientists, the French in particular, seldom did things simply if an absurdly demanding alternative was available.

The number of people on whose cooperative efforts your eventual existence depends has risen to approximately 1,000,000,000,000,000,000, which is several thousand times the total number of people who have ever lived.

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.

For you to be here now, trillions of drifting atoms had somehow to assemble in an intricate and curiously obliging manner to create you.

That is unquestionably the most astounding thing about us—that we are just a collection of inert components, the same stuff you would find in a pile of dirt. I've said it before in another book, but I believe it's worth repeating: the only thing special about the elements that make you is that they make you. That is the miracle of life.

As the physicist Paul Davies puts it, 'If everything needs everything else, how did the communities of molecules ever arise in the first place?' It is rather as if all the ingredients in your kitchen somehow got together and baked themselves into a cake - but a cake that could moreover divide when necessary to produce more cakes. It is little wonder that we call it the miracle of life. It is also little wonder that we have barely begun to understand it.

It fascinated me that Europeans could at once be so alike – that they could be so universally bookish and cerebral, and drive small cars, and live in little houses in ancient towns, and love soccer, and be relatively unmaterialistic and law-abiding, and have chilly hotel rooms and cosy and inviting places to eat and drink – and yet be so endlessly, unpredictably different from each other as well. I loved the idea that you could never be sure of anything in Europe.

Vitamin B proved to be not one vitamin but several, which is why we have B1, B2, and so on. To add to the confusion, Vitamin K has nothing to do with an alphabetical sequence. It was called K because its Danish discoverer, Henrik Dam, dubbed it koagulations viatmin for its role in blood clotting.

Das Fazit aus alledem lautet: Wir leben in einem Universum, dessen Alter wir nicht berechnen können, umgeben von Sternen, deren Entfernung wir nicht kennen, zwischen Materie, die wir nicht identifizieren können, und alles funktioniert nach physikalischen Gesetzen, deren Eigenschaften wir eigentlich nicht verstehen.

It is a natural human impulse to think of evolution as a long chain of improvements, of a never-ending advance towards largeness and complexity – in a word, towards us. We flatter ourselves. Most of the real diversity in evolution has been small-scale. We large things are just flukes – an interesting side branch.

By all the laws of probability proteins shouldn't exist.

For random events to produce even a single protein would seem a stunning improbability—like a whirlwind spinning through a junkyard and leaving behind a fully assembled jumbo jet

a modern-day conservator of Monticello says that Woodmont Jefferson as an amateur architect rather than a professional was that he made things more complicated than they needed to be for any practical purpose.

Yet it has 58 uses as a noun, 126 as a verb, and 10 as a participial adjective. Its meanings are so various and scattered that it takes the OED 60,000 words—the length of a short novel—to discuss them all. A foreigner could be excused for thinking that to know set is to know English.

In fact, of course, the world was about to enter a century of science where many people wouldn't understand anything and none would understand everything.

stromatolites—a kind of living rock made by billions and billions of microscopic cyanobacteria. The tiny respirations of these organisms over millions of years largely created Earth's oxygen-rich atmosphere, paving the way for more complex living things.

As time has shown, it wasn't nearly so simple. Despite half a century of further study, we are no nearer to synthesizing life today than we were in 1953—and

The chances of a 1,055-sequence molecule like collagen spontaneously self-assembling are, frankly, nil.

As Davies puts it, "If everything needs everything else, how did the community of molecules ever arise in the first place?

That is the problem with Scotland, I find. You never know whether the next person you meet is going to offer you his bone marrow or nut you with his forehead. Afterward

like physics before it," Woese wrote, "has moved to a level where the objects of interest and their interactions often cannot be perceived through direct observation." In

You have at least 200,000 different types of protein laboring away inside you, and so far we understand what no more than about 2 percent of them do.

Look at yourself in the mirror and reflect upon the fact that you are beholding ten thousand trillion cells, and that almost every one of them holds two yards of densely compacted DNA, and you begin to appreciate just how much of this stuff you carry around with you.

a little change in the Earth's dynamics can have repercussions beyond our imagining.