Quotes About Complexity

The wonder of cells is not that things occasionally go wrong, but that they manage everything so smoothly for decades at a stretch.

Typically a cell will contain some 20,000 different types of protein, and of these about 2,000 types will each be represented by at least 50,000 molecules.

Every living thing, never forget, is a wonder of atomic engineering. Indeed

Data from any single gene cannot really tell you anything so definitive. If

In this sense, according to Harding, every gene is a different highway, and we have only barely begun to map the routes. "No single gene is ever going to tell you the whole story

Wind back the tape of life21 to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay.

I think both sides have done a bit of a disservice to science by insisting that it must be one thing or the other. Things are likely to turn out to be not so straightforward as either camp would have you believe.

To build the most basic yeast cell, for example, you would have to miniaturize about the same number of components as are found in a Boeing 777 jetliner and fit them into a sphere just five microns across; then somehow you would have to persuade that sphere to reproduce.

For almost four billion years life had dawdled along without any detectable ambitions in the direction of complexity, and then suddenly, in the space of just five or ten million years, it had created all the basic body designs still in use today.

he sees our lineal success as a fortunate fluke: "Wind back the tape of life to the early days of the Burgess Shale; let it play again from an identical starting point, and the chance becomes vanishingly small that anything like human intelligence would grace the replay." Gould

If this seems confusing, you may take some comfort in knowing that it was confusing to physicists, too. Overbye notes: "Bohr once commented that a person who wasn't outraged on first hearing about quantum theory didn't understand what had been said." Heisenberg, when asked how one could envision an atom, replied: "Don't try.

it was a pretty good insight into how unattractive science can get when you're playing at a certain level.

One reason life took so long to grow complex was that the world had to wait until the simpler organisms had oxygenated the atmosphere sufficiently

we may be the living universe's supreme achievement and its worst nightmare simultaneously. Because

I was about to say it was an awful place, but in fact, like most things connected with one's adolescence, it was wonderful and awful at the same time.

It is curious to reflect that we have computers that can effortlessly compute pi to 5,000 places and yet cannot be made to understand that there is a difference between time flies like an arrow and fruit flies like a banana or that in the English-speaking world to make up a story, to make up one's face, and to make up after a fight are all quite separate things.

It is in all that complex synaptic entanglement that our intelligence lies, not in the number of neurons , as was once thought.

was not so much how memory works as how difficult it is to understand how it works.

But astronomy is, quite genuinely, far simpler than the human sciences.

COMPLICATED molecules. About a fifth of our body weight is made up of them. In simplest terms, a protein is a chain of amino acids. About a million different proteins have been identified so far, and nobody knows how many more are to be found. They are all made from just twenty amino acids

It also gives life a richness and unpredictability that endows even the simplest undertakings with an air of challenge and uncertainty.

The universal tree of life on Earth might actually be a forest.

Il cervello è l'individuo. Il resto è un insieme di tubi e impalcature.

bodies are a universe of 37.2 trillion cells operating in more or less perfect concert more or less all the time.