The main character of any living system is openness.
Ilya PrigogineRead
The statistical probability that organic structures and the most precisely harmonized reactions that typify living organisms would be generated by accident, is zero.
Interpretation
Life is not a product of random chance; it arises from complex and precise processes.
This quote highlights the improbability of life arising purely by accident. It suggests that the intricate and harmonious reactions found in living organisms are too complex to have resulted from random occurrences, indicating a deeper order or design behind the origin of life.
In practice
During a lecture on the origins of life, to emphasize that life is not just a random occurrence.
If you thought that science was certain - well, that is just an error on your part.
Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.
I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of all sound speculation in dynamical science. The only contribution of dynamics to theoretical biology is absolute negation of automatic commencement or automatic maintenance of life.
Almost everything that distinguishes the modern world from earlier centuries is attributable to science, which achieved its most spectacular triumphs in the seventeenth century.
Mathematics, in the development of its ideas, has only to take account of the immanent reality of its concepts and has absolutely no obligation to examine their transient reality.
[Concerning] the usual contempt with which an orthodox analytic group treats all outsiders and strangers ... I urge you to think of the young psychoanalysts as your colleagues, collaborators and partners and not as spies, traitors and wayward children. You can never develop a science that way, only an orthodox church.
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