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.
There are an awful lot of scientists today who believe that before very long we shall have unraveled all the secrets of the universe. There will be no puzzles anymore. To me, it'd be really, really tragic because I think one of the most exciting things is this feeling of mystery, feeling of awe, the feeling of looking at a little live thing and being amazed by it and how it has emerged through these hundreds of years of evolution and there it is and it is perfect and why.
The distribution of species on islands and continents throughout the world is exactly what you'd expect if evolution was a fact. The distribution of fossils in space and in time are exactly what you would expect if evolution were a fact. There are millions of facts all pointing in the same direction and no facts pointing in the wrong direction.
It is a misfortune for a science to be born too late when the means of observation have become too perfect. That is what is happening at this moment with respect to physical chemistry; the founders are hampered in their general grasp by third and fourth decimal places.
If your result needs a statistician then you should design a better experiment.
The most important discoveries will provide answers to questions that we do not yet know how to ask and will concern objects we have not yet imagined.
The sciences do not try to explain, they hardly even try to interpret, they mainly make models. By a model is meant a mathematical construct which, with the addition of certain verbal interpretations, describes observed phenomena. The justification of such a mathematical construct is solely and precisely that it is expected to work-that is, correctly to describe phenomena from a reasonably wide area.
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