“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”

— Stuart Kauffman

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 Kauffman14

American biophysicist 1939

Related quotes

“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

“The vocation of man, as that of any other creature, is to be active in all his being. But man cannot act as an individual. The essence of his life activity is cooperation with other individuals of his species. Outside this cooperation, outside of society, man does not achieve any specific human activity. But so long as this co-operation is arbitrarily ruled by accidentality, so long as it is not organized, man remains limited and constricted in his life-activity….”

Moses Hess (1812–1875) German philosopher

Bestimmung des Menschen, p. 275
Hess' Diary

“The view of evolution as a chronic bloody competition among individuals and species, a popular distortion of Darwin's notion of "survival of the fittest," dissolves before a new view of continual cooperation, strong interaction, and mutual dependence among life forms. Life did not take over the globe by combat, but by networkiing. Life forms multiplied and complexified by co-opting others, not just by killing them.”

Lynn Margulis (1938–2011) American evolutionary biologist

Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors (1986)

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

C.G. Jung book Psychological Types

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.

“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)

“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)

“Biology is the scientific study of life - in principle, anyway. In practice, biology is the scientific study of life on Earth based on carbon-chain chemistry. There is nothing in its charter that restricts biology to carbon-based life; it is simply that this is the only kind of life that has been available to study. Thus, theoretical biology has long faced the fundamental obstacle that it is impossible to derive general principles from single examples… Without other examples, it is difficult to distinguish essential properties of life - properties that would be shared by any living system - from properties that may be incidental to life in principle, but which happen to be universal to life on Earth due solely to a combination of local historical accident and common genetic descent.”

Christopher Langton (1949) American computer scientist

Source: Artificial Life (1989), p.2

“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 <br class="br">On magic <br class="br">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.

“I look to stories for consolation,the kind of small consolation that one needs to want to wake up everyday;as template for life;for news on how others live;for reminders that life's mysteries have no key”

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (1977) Nigerian writer

The Best Short Stories(2021)

“Scotland's long-term prosperity does not depend solely - or even predominantly - on oil and gas. It will also be based on our success in the other industries of the future - sectors such as renewable energy and the life sciences, where we are already a major European player.”

Alex Salmond (1954) Scottish National Party politician and former First Minister of Scotland

Vision for Scotland in the European Union (December 12, 2007)

“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”

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Stuart Kauffman14

Related quotes

Related topics