“Life does not depend on the magic of Watson-Crick base pairing or any other specific template-replicating machinery. Life lies … in the property of catalytic closure among a collection of molecular species”

Source: At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1996), p.50 as cited in: Gert Korthof (1998)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Life does not depend on the magic of Watson-Crick base pairing or any other specific template-replicating machinery. Li…" by Stuart Kauffman?
Stuart Kauffman photo
Stuart Kauffman 14
American biophysicist 1939

Related quotes

Rudolph Rummel photo

“Democracy says, ‘Govern yourself, but do so in a manner consistent with the same right of others.’ Democracy does not lay down a template for each person’s life, as do dictatorships.”

Rudolph Rummel (1932–2014) American academic

Source: The Blue Book of Freedom: Ending Famine, Poverty, Democide, and War (2007), p. 22

Moses Hess photo
Lynn Margulis photo
C.G. Jung photo

“The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious.”

Source: Psychological Types, or, The Psychology of Individuation (1921), Ch. 5, p. 271
Context: The great problems of life — sexuality, of course, among others — are always related to the primordial images of the collective unconscious. These images are really balancing or compensating factors which correspond with the problems life presents in actuality. This is not to be marvelled at, since these images are deposits representing the accumulated experience of thousands of years of struggle for adaptation and existence.

Kuruvilla Pandikattu photo

“Life is security and daring,/ Life is protection and risk,/ Life is openness and closure,/ It is safety and adventure.”

Kuruvilla Pandikattu (1957) Indian philosopher

Life: Relish It!
Life: Relish It! (2012)

Fulton J. Sheen photo

“When the record of any human life is set down, there are three pairs of eyes who see it in a different light. There is the life as I see it. as others see it, and as God sees it.”

Fulton J. Sheen (1895–1979) Catholic bishop and television presenter

Treasure in Clay: the Autobiography of Fulton J. Sheen, (New York, NY: Image Books/Doubleday, 1980)

Christopher Langton photo
Grant Morrison photo

“Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic.”

Grant Morrison (1960) writer

Popimage interview https://web.archive.org/web/20040803001942/http://www.popimage.com/content/grant20044.html
On magic
Context: All the comics are sigils. "Sigil" as a word is out of date. All this magic stuff needs new terminology because it's not what people are being told it is at all. It's not all this wearying symbolic misdirection that's being dragged up from the Victorian Age, when no-one was allowed to talk plainly and everything was in coy poetic code. The world's at a crisis point and it's time to stop bullshitting around with Qabalah and Thelema and Chaos and Information and all the rest of the metaphoric smoke and mirrors designed to make the rubes think magicians are "special" people with special powers. It's not like that. Everyone does magic all the time in different ways. "Life" plus "significance" = magic.

Chi­ma­man­da Ngo­zi Adi­chie photo
Alex Salmond photo

Related topics