“The fallacy of genetic determinism is to suppose that the genes "make" the organism. It is a basic principle of developmental biology that organisms undergo a continuous development from conception to death, a development that is the unique consequence of the interaction of the genes in their cells, the temporal sequence of environments through which the organisms pass, and random cellular processes that determine the life, death, and transformation of cells. As a result, even the fingerprints of identical twins are not identical. Their temperaments, mental processes, abilities, life choices, disease histories, and death certainly differ despite the determined efforts of many parents to enforce as great a similarity as possible.”

—  Richard C. Lewontin

" The Confusion over Cloning http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1997/oct/23/the-confusion-over-cloning/," The New York Review of Books, 23 October 1997.
Review of Cloning Human Beings: Report and Recommendations of the National Bioethics Advisory Commission by the National Bioethics Advisory Commission.

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Richard C. Lewontin 14
American evolutionary biologist 1929

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“In Nature organic growth proceeds according to a “master plan,” a “blueprint.” According to this master plan diversification among cells is determined by the requirements of the various organs; the size and shape of the organs and, therefore, their growth processes are determined by their function, which in turn depends on the needs of the whole organism.
Such a “master plan” is missing from the process of growth and development of the world system… The masterplan has yet to evolve through the existence of options by people who constitute the world-system.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

Source: Mankind at the Turning Point, (1974), p. 7 As cited in: (1998) The Green Crusade: Rethinking the Roots of Environmentalism, p. 143

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“The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.”

Francisco Varela (1946–2001) Chilean biologist

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 137

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“The relations that define a system as a unity, and determine the dynamics of interaction and transformations which it may undergo as such a unity constitute the organization of the machine.”

Humberto Maturana (1928) Chilean biologist and philosopher

Source: Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living (1980), p. 137.

“[T]he psychic and physical characteristics of human beings, and the differences between individuals, are the consequence of an interaction between the genes that are present in the fertilized egg and the sequence of environmental circumstances that the developing organism experiences during its entire life history. With a few exceptions, like cystic fibrosis where possession of the defective genotype leads ineluctably to the disease, or language acquisition where the language spoken depends only on experience and not at all on genotype, human characteristics are all subject to this interaction of forces. There are, moreover, random events in cell growth and differentiation that are neither genetic nor environmental in the usual sense, and which play an extremely important part in development, especially in behavioral traits.”

Richard C. Lewontin (1929) American evolutionary biologist

Genes and Sexuality: An Exchange (1995)

“Complex organisms cannot be construed as the sum of their genes, nor do genes alone build particular items of anatomy or behavior by themselves. Most genes influence several aspects of anatomy and behavior—as they operate through complex interactions with other genes and their products, and with environmental factors both within and outside the developing organism. We fall into a deep error, not just a harmful oversimplification, when we speak of genes “for” particular items of anatomy or behavior.”

Stephen Jay Gould book I Have Landed

"The Without and Within of Smart Mice", p. 234 (originally appeared in Time, 1999-09-13)
I Have Landed (2002)

“Development of an organism from a single germ cell into a multicellular entity is a self-organizing system from any point of view and I wish to contend that this self-organizing system is a subsystem of the self-organizing system called 'evolution.”

Gordon Pask (1928–1996) British psychologist

Source: An Approach to Cybernetics (1961), p. 103-104, partly cited in: Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson, Alessio Cavallaro (2004) Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History.

“[Another significant aspect of the concept of growth is the distinction that Mesarovic and Pestel draw between "undifferentiated" and "organic" growth. The former type of growth, according to these authors, consists of mere replication of cells by cellular division, usually expotentially, with an increase in quantity alone. The latter type of growth] involves a process of differentiation, which means that various groups of cells begin to differ in structure and function… During and after differentiation the number of cells can still increase, and the organs grow in size, but while some organs grow, others might celine.”

Mihajlo D. Mesarovic (1928) Serbian academic

As cited in: Joel Jay Kassiola (1990) The Death of Industrial Civilization. p. 48
Mankind at the Turning Point, (1974)

“Every isolated determinate dynamic system, obeying unchanging laws, will ultimately develop some sort of organisms that are adapted to their environments.”

W. Ross Ashby (1903–1972) British psychiatrist

Ashby (1962), quoted in: V. Lawrence Parsegian (1972) This cybernetic world of men, machines, and earth systems'. p. 178: About the principle of self-organization

“The fourth model of mind, closely related to the previous one, is the structuralist model, as represented by Piaget, Chomsky, Levi-Strauss, and the structural-developmental version of the psychoanalytical theory. This model assumes the presence of innate structures or potentialities to develop such structures. These structures are not directly experienced or observed; rather, they are inferred from the organization of cognitive processes and behaviour and also from the regularity and orderliness of development. The development proceeds through The development proceeds through well defined stages. There are two versions of the structuralist development model. In the preformist version, the structures exist in potential form at birth and only actualize themselves in the maturation-development process. In the epigenetic version, the structures develop in a dialectic interaction with the environment. The final outcome us not completely determined at births but also depends on the environmental factors.”

Thaddus E. Weckowicz (1919–2000) Canadian psychologist

Source: Models of Mental Illness (1984), p. 102-103

“Molecular biology has also shown that the basic design of the cell system is essentially the same in all living systems on earth from bacteria to mammals. In all organisms the roles of DNA, mRNA and protein are identical. The meaning of the genetic code is also virtually identical in all cells. The size, structure and component design of the protein synthetic machinery is practically the same in all cells. In terms of their basic biochemical design, therefore no living system can be thought of as being primitive or ancestral with respect to any other system, nor is there the slightest empirical hint of an evolutionary sequence among all the incredibly diverse cells on earth.”

Michael Denton book Evolution: A Theory in Crisis

Source: Evolution: A Theory in Crisis (1986), p. 250

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