Quotes About Complexity

YOUR ASSHOLE, MY ASSHOLE, THE WORLD IS FULL OF BILLIONS OF ASSHOLES. THE PRESIDENT HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE CARWASH BOY HAS AN ASSHOLE, THE JUDGE AND THE MURDERER HAVE ASSHOLES

The varieties are not like islands, carefully apart," Perales explained. "They are more like gentle hills in a landscape—you see them, they are clearly present, but you cannot specify precisely where they start.

This symbiosis was fantastically improbable. In 3.5 billion years of history and trillions of trillions of interactions between protozoa and cyanobacteria it seems to have happened exactly once.

I wish I could explain things better, to make you understand. But I can't. It's just too hard to find the right word.

To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I confess, absurd in the highest degree...The difficulty of believing that a perfect and complex eye could be formed by natural selection , though insuperable by our imagination, should not be considered subversive of the theory.

We cannot fathom the marvelous complexity of an organic being; but on the hypothesis here advanced this complexity is much increased. Each living creature must be looked at as a microcosm--a little universe, formed of a host of self-propagating organisms, inconceivably minute and as numerous as the stars in heaven.

One hand has surely worked throughout the universe.

Such simple instincts as bees making a beehive could be sufficient to overthrow my whole theory.

Let it also be borne in mind how infinitely complex and close-fitting are the mutual relations of all organic beings to each other and to their physical conditions of life; and consequently what infinitely varied diversities of structure might be of use to each being under changing conditions of life.

The difference in mind between man and the higher animals, great as it is, certainly is one of degree and not of kind.

It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as the plan of creation, unity of design

Slow though the process of selection may be, if feeble man can do much by his power of artificial selection, I can see no limit to the amount of change to the beauty and infinite complexity of the coadaptations between all organic beings, one with another and with their physical conditions of life, which may be effected in the long course of time by nature's power of selection.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us.

Grâce à cette lutte, les variations, quelque faibles qu'elles soient, et de quelque causes qu'elles proviennent, tendent à préserver les individus d'une espèce et se transmettent ordinairement à leur descendance, pourvu qu'elles soient utiles à ces individus dans leurs rapports infiniment complexes avec les autres êtres organisés et avec la nature extérieure.

the works of Nature are to those of Art.

Podemos creer que la selección natural llegue a producir, por una parte, un órgano de insignificante importancia, como la cola de la jirafa, que sirve de espantamoscas, y por otra parte, un órgano tan maravilloso como el ojo?

I do know that however hard you try, you can't see the inside tangle of somebody else's love—or whatever uglier word applies—not deep enough to make sense of it.

semiologists would agree is that one simply cannot speak of "meaning" as if it were one thing that we can all know or share. The concept meaning is multivalent, has many meanings itself…

Pues si los cambios que experimentan los animales inferiores son tan maravillosos y difíciles de descubrir, ¿por qué no habría de haber cambios igual de maravillosos o más, e igualmente difíciles de descubrir, en los seres superiores? ¿No

Information is that which defies expectation.

There are two types of people in this world," Pete volunteers helpfully, "those who think there are only two types of people in the world, and everybody else.

AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they're almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn't stealthily dump core in your shoes.)

Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness.

To put it bluntly, there are too many humans on this planet. Six-billion-plus primates. And we think too loudly. Our brains are neurocomputers, incredibly complex. The more observers there are, the more quantum weirdness is observed, and the more inconsistencies creep into our reality.