Quotes About Complexity

Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it!

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off. The currency used in the casino of evolution is survival, strictly gene survival, but for many purposes individual survival is a reasonable approximation.

In the case of living machinery, the 'designer' is unconscious natural selection, the blind watchmaker.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

however many ways there may be of being alive, it is certain that there are vastly more ways of being dead, or rather not alive. You may throw cells together at random, over and over again for a billion years, and not once will you get a conglomeration that flies or swims or burrows or runs, or does anything, even badly, that could remotely be construed as working to keep itself alive.

No sane creator, setting out from scratch to design a flat-fish, would have conceived on his drawing board the absurd distortion of the head needed to bring both eyes round to one side.

That scientifically savvy philosopher Daniel Dennett pointed out that evolution counters one of the oldest ideas we have: 'the idea that it takes a big fancy smart thing to make a lesser thing. I call that the trickle-down theory of creation.

Why did it take so long for a Darwin to arrive on the scene? What delayed humanity's tumbling to that luminously simple idea which seems, on the face of it, so much easier to grasp than the mathematical ideas given us by Newton two centuries earlier - or, indeed, by Archimedes two millennia earlier?

we're apt to forget that symmetry is not an obvious quality that every creature must have.

anything that suggests that complicated life forms appeared suddenly, in one go (rather than evolving gradually step by step), is just a lazy story – no better than the fictional magic of a fairy godmother's wand. As

We are surrounded by endless forms, most beautiful and most wonderful, and it is no accident, but the direct consequence of evolution by non-random natural selection – the only game in town, the greatest show on Earth.

Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria.

However statistically improbable the entity you seek to explain by invoking a designer, the designer himself has got to be at least as improbable. God is the Ultimate Boeing 747.

Darwin himself said as much: 'If it could be demonstrated that any complex organ existed which could not possibly have been formed by numerous, successive, slight modifications, my theory would absolutely break down. But I can find no such case.' Darwin could find no such case, and nor has anybody since Darwin's time, despite strenuous, indeed desperate, efforts. Many candidates for this holy grail of creationism have been proposed. None has stood up to analysis.

how unordered atoms could group themselves into ever more complex patterns until they ended up manufacturing people.

The evolution of complex life, indeed its very existence in a universe obeying physical laws, is wonderfully surprising - or would be but for the fact that surprise is an emotion that can exist only in a brain which is the product of that very surprising process

If we are going to allow ourselves the luxury of postulating organized complexity without offering an explanation, we might as well make a job of it and simply postulate the existence of life as we know it!

Parsimony is always in the forefront of a scientist's mind when choosing between theories, but it isn't always obvious how to judge it.

Far from pointing to a designer, the illusion of design in the living world is explained with far greater economy and with devastating elegance by Darwinian natural selection

A God capable of continuously monitoring and controlling the individual status of every particle in the universe cannot be simple.

To recapitulate, the significance of the difference between growth and reproduction is that reproduction permits a new beginning, a new developmental cycle, and a new organism which may be an improvement, in terms of the fundamental organization of complex structure, over its predecessor.

Prediction in a complex world is a chancy business. Every decision that a survival machine takes is a gamble, and it is the business of genes to program brains in advance so that on average they take decisions that pay off.

Why did sex, that bizarre perversion of straightforward replication, ever arise in the first place? What is the good of sex?* This is an extremely difficult question for the evolutionist to answer.

This is a subtle, complicated idea. It is complicated because the 'environment' of a gene consists largely of other genes, each of which is itself being selected for its ability to cooperate with its environment of other genes.