|
p.2 An organism is merely a transition, a stage between what was and what will be.
[JLJ - I think this applies to all things, so it is kind of vague.]
p.3 In a mutation there are 'causes'... in no case can there be correlation between the cause and the effect of the mutation. Nor is this contingency limited to mutations alone. It applies to each stage in the formation of an individual's genetic heredity
p.4 Everything in a living being is centered on reproduction.
p.5 variability is an inherent quality in the vary nature of living systems... Modifications in the programme occur at random. It is only afterwards that a sorting operation takes place, by the very fact that every organism which appears is immediately put to the test of reproduction. The famous 'struggle for survival' merely represents a contest for progeny - an endless competition recommencing with each generation... In this eternal contest there is only one criterion - fecundity.
p.8 In all cases, however, the finality of their reproduction justifies both the structure of the present-day living systems and their history.
p.8 To adjust a response with reference to a potential enemy or to an eventual sexual partner is to adapt, in the most precise sense of the word. In evolution, a genetic programme which makes such reactions automatic is certain to prevail over one which does not. The same is true of a programme which allows learning and adaptation of behaviour by various regulatory systems. In each case, reproduction acts as the main operative factor
p.10 This book deals with the history of heredity and reproduction. It deals with the changes in the way man has looked at the nature of living beings, their structure and their continuity.
p.11 Each period is characterized by a range of possibilities defined not only by current theories or beliefs, but also by the very nature of the objects accessible to investigation, the equipment available for studying them and the way of observing and discussing them. It is only within this range that reason can manoeuvre.
p.12 When a theory appears too soon, as in the case of Mendel's laws of inheritance, no one pays attention to it.
p.14 Even the sudden appearance of an instrument which increases the discriminatory powers of the senses is never more than the practical application of an abstract concept.
p.20 For Fernel, when an object is created, it is the form that is created. When the object perishes, only the form disappears, not the matter
p.23 The creation of a living being, like that of everything else, requires the union of matter and form.
[JLJ - ...and an exceptional, refined, 'trick' of sorts that 'works', and can keep on 'working'.]
p.43 Everything fitted together in the functioning of an organism, all elements were connected and all the parts articulated. Behind the forms, the demands of physiology appeared.
p.43-44 Not only did the organs depend on one another, but their presence and arrangement were the result of necessities imposed by the laws of nature governing matter and its transformations. What gave living beings their intrinsic properties was the interplay of relationships secretly uniting the parts so that the whole should function. It was the organization hidden behind the visible structure.
[JLJ - What gives game pieces their intrinsic properties is the interplay of relationships secretly uniting them, so that the whole should function. It is the organization hidden behind the visible structure. Maybe that line will appear in a book on chess theory in the future.]
p.45 To be a naturalist... observation is not enough. One also has to see what is important - and nothing else.
[JLJ - the same is true when playing a complex game of strategy - perhaps observation is composed of three stages -
- an experienced scanning, where we take in a wide variety of sensory data from a wide variety of directions, followed by
- a "musing", where we spend a brief amount of time on each of the many things which "catch" our attention, perhaps only long enough to categorize, count and interpret cues, followed by
- an intuitive "how much should I care about that?"
We wisely follow observation with paying attention to those "musements" which critically demand our attention. "What is important" has to emerge indirectly from a process.]
p.45 Always moving and quivering, an animal continuously changes shape... Beneath the animal's outer covering lurks an area of mystery; under the hair, feathers or shell, there lie the secret and confusing world of organs and the machinery of the entrails... At first sight, the structure of an animal... is a very complex architectural object.
p.48 Linked to the details of structure, the character constitutes the 'proper mark' of the plant. It represents the trace which must persist in thought after examination and description of a plant... By considering a single character of the plant, by naming it and keeping this quality alone in mind - in short, by reducing the plant to a single character - thought frees itself from the chaos of sentient images. It can then carry out its work of classification.
p.85 What became accessible to comparative investigation was a system of relationships in the depth of a living organism, designed to make it function. Behind the visible forms could be glimpsed the profile of a secret architecture imposed by the necessity of living. This second-order structure was organization, which brought together into one coherent whole both what was seen and what was hidden... It enables one to scan the living world and to bring some order into its complexity... It was organization that gave living beings the internal law determining the very possibility of their existence.
p.88 It is the notion of organization... which makes finality necessary, to the degree that structure is inseparable from its purpose.
p.90 The living body is subject to the action of various influences, that come from things as well as beings and tend to destroy it. To resist that action, a principle of reaction is needed. Life is nothing other than this principle of struggle against destruction. For Bichat, life is 'the sum of the functions that oppose death'
p.91 The powers of order, unification and life are constantly battling against those of disorder, destruction and death. The living body is the theatre of that fight, in which health and disease reflect the changes of fortune.
p.91-92 Life is transmitted from being to being in an unbroken succession. Life is continuous.
p.104 The very existence of an organism depends not only on the execution of certain functions, but on their coordination. The living body, therefore, cannot be a mere collection of organs... The organs must... be arranged to produce a harmonious whole, 'because in the living state,' said Cuvier, 'organs are not merely close together, but act on each other and all cooperate for a common aim... There is no function that does not require the aid and cooperation of almost all the others.' Consequently, any modification in one structure exercises an influence on the others.
p.113 For Bichat, Nature is always found 'to be uniform in her procedures, variable only in her results, sparing in the means she uses and generous in the effects she obtains from them, modifying in a thousand ways the few general principles that, differently applied, rule our economy and produce its innumerable phenomena'
p.144 According to Lamarck, three factors work together to give time its creative role: succession, duration and improvement of organization.
p.147 Gradually, step by step, without errors or failures, nature creates, improves and modifies the forms of living bodies to achieve her end: the highest degree of perfection.
p.155 The organism cannot be dissociated from its environment. It is the whole system that is modified and transformed.
p.168 As soon as they appear, varieties take part in the competition. They win or lose, depending on whether or not the difference between them and their ancestor favours multiplication. Hence the gradual replacement of certain species by others better adapted to reproduce under certain conditions.
p.169 For Malthus, the development of human populations was subject to the action of two factors working in opposite ways: on the one hand, 'multiplication by geometrical progression'; on the other, external obstacles such as destruction, war, scourges, famine; in short all the restrictions necessarily brought to bear on expansion, particularly the fact that the 'means of existence' themselves cannot increase at the same rate, but at best by arithmetical progression. Hence a conflict that, in human societies, produces a 'struggle for existence'
p.170 It is not man who acts directly on variability. Modifications appear only 'occasionally' without our knowing how to produce them. They arise spontaneously, as it were, unconnected with the slightest need or the least requirement of the organism.
p.172 The most trifling advantage an organism may have over its rivals of the same species tips the scales in its favour. The slightest change in efficiency of reproduction is enough to change the population balance... Natural selection operates by means of differential reproduction.
p.174 any organism appearing on earth is immediately put to the test of life and reproduction.
p.174 There is no manichaeism in the way nature produces novelties, nothing of progress and regression, of good and evil, of better and worse. Variation occurs at random, that is, without any relation between cause and result. Only after a new being has emerged is it confronted by the conditions of existence. Only once they exist are candidates put to the test of reproduction.
[JLJ - From Wikipedia, the term "manichean" is widely applied (often used as a derogatory term) as an adjective to a philosophy of moral dualism, according to which a moral course of action involves a clear (or simplistic) choice between good and evil, or as a noun to people who hold such a view.]
p.175 There is also a sorting operation in nature; but it is automatic. Everything that can interfere with reproduction in some way modifies it. Among the candidates for reproduction, no intention directs the choice of the elect, which is made a posteriori on the testing bench, and results only from the qualities and performances of the individuals. Adaptation becomes the outcome of a subtle interplay between organisms and their environment. For although the power to reproduce is inherent in the organism, its realization closely depends on all the variables of environment.
p.180-181 Until the middle of the nineteenth century, biology remained largely an observational science... Biology had to change its place of work. Previously, it had been conducted in nature: when the naturalist was not in the field observing living beings in his own setting, he was working in a natural history museum, a zoo or a botanical garden. Thenceforth, biology was carried out in the laboratory.
p.188 Complexity of organization means freedom of functioning... The more complex the organism, the more independent it is.
p.193 The forces acting in fields as different as motion, electricity, magnetism, heat, light or chemical reactions found a common denominator in the concept of energy. Energy is any form of work and it is anything that produces work or is produced by work.
p.199 The whole attitude of the nineteenth century was transformed by the new outlook inspired by statistical mechanics... Most events which occurred in the physical world could be treated in this way... All became subject to statistical laws.
p.206 With Mendel, biological phenomena suddenly acquired the rigour of mathematics.
p.208 Father Gregor Mendel... was perhaps an amateur, but he was in contact with many of the most famous biologists of his time. He kept up a long correspondence with several of them, describing his experiments in detail; but he did not capture their attention.
p.213 With the sea-urchin egg, the study of the cell and of embryonic development ceased to be purely observational, and became experimental.
[JLJ - Game theory needs to find the equivalent of the sea-urchin egg.]
p.227-228 One by one, most of the obstacles raised between organic and inorganic chemistry crumbled. First, the concept of energy and its conservation began to assume one of the roles previously ascribed to vital force. Energy exists in the very structure of a chemical compound: that is to say, in the forces linking atoms together in the molecule... The second thread that helped to reunite organic and inorganic chemistry was the total synthesis of organic compounds.
p.228 In living beings, chemical transformations take place through the coupling of reactions which allow transfer of energy. In addition to the flow of matter through the organism, there runs a flow of energy.
p.240-241 To increase and multiply... organisms must be provided with energy from an external source... But in every case, to be available when required, energy must be stored in chemical form. Biochemists found that it is stocked in certain phosphorus compounds containing the so-called 'energy-rich bonds'. Through the formation, synthesis and transfer of such bonds the energy of biological systems is stored, released or exchanged. In the last analysis, a single unique compound common to the whole living world, adenosine triphosphate, constitutes the energy storage in all organisms.
[JLJ - I wish it were also true for machines playing complex games of strategy. Perhaps we can invent a concept for game theory and call it ATP.]
p.245 If physics did not seem able to explain all the phenomena of life, this was no longer because of a force peculiar to the living world and beyond the reach of all knowledge; it was because of the limitations inherent in observation and investigation and because of the complexity of living organisms as compared with inanimate matter.
p.248 The qualities, functions and development of a living organism thus simply express the interactions between its components.
p.251 Information, an abstract entity, becomes the point of junction of the different types of order. It is at one and the same time what is measured, what is transmitted and what is transformed.
p.251-252 In the end, any organized system can be analysed by means of two concepts: message and feedback regulation. Message means a series of symbols taken from a certain repertory - signs, letters, sounds, phonemes, etc. A given message thus represents a particular selection among all the arrangements possible... Feedback is a principle of regulation that allows a machine to adjust its activity, not only in terms of what it has to do, but also in terms of what it actually is doing. It operates by introducing into the system the results of its past activity.
p.252 animal and machine... Both have special equipment, in fact, for collecting at a low energy-level the information coming from the outside world and for transforming it for their own purposes. In both cases, it is the realization, not the intention, that adjusts the action of the system on the outside world through the intermediary of a regulatory centre.
p.253 Animal and machine, each system then becomes a model for the other.
p.278 Able to function only within the cell, the genetic message can do nothing by itself. It can only guide what is being done. To produce machines from plans, there have to be machines.
p.282 The only factor that gives unity to such a complex system is the way the constituents are coordinated.
p.282-283 Coupled with the organs of perception and directing them, there have to be organs of execution, able to 'sound out' the external world, to detect the presence of certain compounds acting as signals and to measure their concentration.
p.287 In the genetic programme, therefore, is written the result of all past reproductions, the collection of successes, since all traces of failures have disappeared. The genetic message, the programme of the present-day organism, therefore, resembles a text without an author, that a proof-reader has been correcting for more than two billion years
p.289 Mutations... What characterizes these events is that they cannot be oriented in any particular direction, either by the environment or by any constituent of the cell.
p.293 only what exists is reproduced. Selection operates, not on possible, but on existing, living organisms.
p.294 whether it is a question of exploiting the possibilities of an existing programme or of changing it, adaptation is always the result of a selective, not an instructive, effect of environment.
p.296 An accident can be transformed into an innovation, an error into success. For natural selection is a game with its own rules. All that count are the changes that affect the number of offspring. If they reduce that number, they are mistakes; if they increase it, they are exploits. There are neither tricks nor stratagems in the game; only a careful score of profit and loss.
[JLJ - Text had 'not' in place of 'nor' - likely an error.]
p.297 The little bacterial cell is so arranged that the whole system can reproduce as often as once every twenty minutes.
p.298 Only the activity of the genetic material, not its structure, is subject to the regulation that coordinates the components of the organism.
p.298 The interactions between the population and its environment eventually have repercussions on the reproduction of the novelties that occur spontaneously in the genetic text. In the last analysis, there does exist, between the genetic programme and the environment, that necessary relation required by adaptation. But this relationship is only established in a roundabout way through a long feedback loop that adjusts the quality of the message according to the number of descendants... Without any thought to dictate it, without any imagination to renew it, the genetic programme is transformed as it is carried out.
p.302 Construction in successive stages is the principle governing the formation of all living systems
p.303-304 What gives a collection of objects the property of assembling is their sameness. Not only can they form geometrical structures; they can do so spontaneously.
p.323 Whatever their level, the objects of analysis are always organizations, systems.
p.323 Integration changes the quality of things.
|
