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p.5 Everything existing in the Universe is the fruit of chance and necessity. Democritus
p.13 The very ingenuousness of a fresh look at things (and science possesses an ever-youthful eye) may sometimes shed a new light upon old problems.
p.15 The difference between artificial and natural objects appears immediate and unambiguous to all of us. [JLJ - Ok, so then why do we continue call artificial intelligence, 'artificial'? Perhaps it is better called man-made intelligence.]
p.27 Living creatures are strange objects, as men of all past ages must have been more or less confusedly aware.
p.29 the 'dream' (as Francois Jacob has put it) of every cell: to become two cells.
p.49 The thesis I shall present in this book is that the biosphere does not contain a predictable class of objects or of events but is a particular event, certainly compatible indeed with first principles, but not deducible from those principles and therefore essentially unpredictable.
p.51 The concept of teleonomy implies the idea of an oriented, coherent, and constructive activity. By these standards proteins must be considered the essential molecular agents of telonomic performance in living beings.
p.51 Living beings are chemical machines. [JLJ - living beings are mind-boggling examples of what is possible through chemistry.]
p.66 cells... operative principles... elementary control operations are handled by specialized proteins acting as detectors and transducers of chemical information.
p.74 by 'metabolism' we essentially mean the transformations of small molecules and the mobilization of chemical potential.
p.96 A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.
p.110 it necessarily follows that chance alone is at the source of every innovation, of all creation in he biosphere. Pure chance, absolutely free but blind, at the very root of the stupendous edifice of evolution: this central concept of modern biology is no longer one among other possible or even conceivable hypotheses. It is today the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one compatible with observed and tested fact. [JLJ - yes, but it was chance that created a process that relies on chance to innovate - so chance appears twice in the equation - more than twice if you consider that chance also brought the parents together. If life is matched to the environment, then what is the universe matched to?]
p.114 The initial elementary events which open the way to evolution in the intensely conservative systems called living beings are microscopic, fortuitous, and totally unrelated to whatever may be their effects upon teleonomic functioning... Drawn from the realm of pure chance, the accident enters into that of necessity... For natural selection operates at the macroscopic level, the level of organisms... natural selection operates upon the products of chance and knows no other nourishment
p.115 the decisive factor in natural selection is not the struggle for life, but - within a given species - the differential rate of reproduction... It is... the aggregate expression of the properties of the network of constructive and regulatory interactions, that is judged by selection; and that is why evolution itself seems to be fulfilling a design, seems to be carrying out a 'project'
p.118-119 the second law of thermodynamics... formulating only a statistical prediction, of course does not deny to any macroscopic system the possibility of, almost imperceptibly and for a very brief space, reascending the slope of entropy... In living beings it is precisely these fugitive stirrings which, caught up and reproduced by the replicative mechanism, have been retained by selection.
p.119 It is not surprising but altogether natural that the results obtained by this mechanism... the general upward course of evolution, the perfecting and enrichment of the teleonomic apparatus - should appear miraculous to some, paradoxical to others... This is due, at least in part, to the extreme difficulty of imagining the inexhaustible resources of the well of chance from which selection draws.
p.132 The evolutionary concept is central to biology and will be defined and elaborated for many years to come.
p.137 The universe was not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game.
p.141 analysis by the central nervous system of sense impressions furnishes a meagre and slanted image of the external world... where the emphasis and focus are exclusively upon what is of special interest to the animal, in view of its specific behaviour.
p.154 For a biologist it is tempting to compare the evolution of ideas and of the biosphere.
p.154-155 a theory of the selection of ideas... one may at least try to define some of the principal factors involved in it. This selection must necessarily operate at two levels: that of the mind itself and that of performance.
The performance value of an idea depends on the change it brings to the behaviour of the person or the group that adopts it... Its 'promotion value' bears no relation to the amount of objective truth the idea may contain... The 'spreading power' of an idea is much more difficult to analyse... What is very plain, however, is that the ideas having the highest invading potential are those that explain man by assigning him his place in an immanent destiny, a safe harbour where his anxiety dissolves.
p.161 values and knowledge are always and necessarily associated in action as in discourse.
p.161 Action brings knowledge and values simultaneously into play, or into question. All action signifies an ethic, serves or disserves certain values; constitutes a choice of values, or pretends to. On the other hand, knowledge is necessarily implied in all action, while reciprocally, action is one of the two necessary sources of knowledge.
p.164 Authentic discourse is in its turn the foundation of science, and it gives back to man the immense powers that enrich and threaten him today, that free him but might also subjugate him.
p.164 The ethic of knowledge that created the modern world is the only ethic compatible with it, the only one capable, once understood and accepted, of guiding its evolution.
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