Quotes About Complexity

Many origin-of-life scientists have similarly recognized how difficult it is to generate specified biological information by chance alone in the time available on the early earth (or even in the time available since the beginning of the universe).

According to Darwinian theory, differences in biological form should increase gradually, steadily increasing the number of distinct body plans and phyla, over time. References for first appearances are found in note 5 of this chapter.

Instead, the Precambrian–Cambrian fossil record, especially in light of the Burgess Shale after Walcott, points to the geologically sudden appearance of complex and novel body plans.

I am both happy and sad at the same time, and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.

So, this is my life. And I want you to know that I am both happy and sad and I'm still trying to figure out how that could be.

I am very interested and fascinated how everyone loves each other, but no one really likes each other.

It's rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it's Hemingway, Van Gogh... Robert Schumann has been mentioned... Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath... some of them with rather grim ends.

It's not easy, being a terrible person.

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction. ALBERT EINSTEIN

these sensory capacities are deeply interwoven with the complexity that we know of as the world. They are a primary point of interface between me and not me. For the ecological sophistication that we call Earth to exist, those interfaces must, of necessity, be extremely sophisticated as well.

The foundational problem with that view is that all living organisms, it turns out, are self-organized and all of them show emergent behaviors.

Bacteria, as a group, are, in actuality, an extremely large self-organized system that covers the entire world.

Such self-organization always begins the same way, or as researchers Scott Camazine et al. put it, "At a critical density a pattern arises within the system.

At such a moment, the molecules have combined into a system that is self-organized. A phase change occurs. Something more than the sum of the parts has come into being. And . . . it just happens. Like water turning into ice. And you can't predict what the system will look like after the phase change. For

There is no linear additive process that, if all the parts are taken together, can be understood to create the total system that occurs at the moment of self-organization; it is not a quantity that comes into being. It is not predictable in its shape or subsequent behavior or its subsequent qualities. There is a nonlinear quality that comes into being at the moment of synchronicity.

As James Lovelock notes . . . No one doubts that humans are in thermostasis, yet our core temperatures range from 35 to 40°C and our extremities from 5 to 45°C. This may appear imprecise, but it serves us well.9

Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius—and a lot of courage—to move in the opposite direction.

The world is made up of a series of nested self-organized systems within other nested self-organized systems within other self-organized systems. They, together, make up the much larger system we know as Earth, the living, self-organized biological organism that James Lovelock named Gaia. And all of them are intelligent.

Symbiosis entails the unfathomably messy entanglements that constitute temporal assemblages that sometimes emerge as symbiogenetic singularities. 14

Women. They are a complete mystery.

Equations are just the boring part of mathematics. I attempt to see things in terms of geometry.

One of the basic rules of the universe is that nothing is perfect. Perfection simply doesn't exist.....Without imperfection, neither you nor I would exist

The machinations of my mind are an enigma." -Patrick Starr

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.