“The underlying reason for convergence seems to be that all organisms are under constant scrutiny of natural selection and are also subject to the constraints of the physical and chemical factors that severely limit the action of all inhabitants of the biosphere. Put simply, convergence shows that in a real world not all things are possible.”

— Simon Conway Morris

Source: The Crucible of Creation (1998), p. 202.

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

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Simon Conway Morris 28

British palaeontologist 1951

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 30

“Independent derivation meshed beautifully with the triumph, from the 1930's on, of a strict version of Darwinism based on the near ubiquity of adaptive design built by natural selection… Arthropods and vertebrates do share several features of functional design. But those similarities only reflect the power of natural selection to craft optimal structures independently in a world of limited biomechanical solutions to common functional problems - an evolutionary phenomenon called convergence.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms

"Brotherhood by Inversion", p. 328
Leonardo's Mountain of Clams and the Diet of Worms (1998)

“To photograph is to hold one's breath, when all faculties converge to capture fleeting reality. It's at that precise moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.”

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) French photographer

Source: Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Mind's Eye: Writings on Photography and Photographers

“Why is there anything at all? or as the question is famously put, Why is there something rather than nothing? Physics, especially quantum physics, shows that the correct answer to this question is: No reason, no reason at all.”

Alexander Rosenberg (1946) American philosopher

The Atheist's Guide to Reality (2011)

“The rules followed are tight enough to produce a broad overlap in the decisions taken by all individuals and hence a convergence powerful enough to be labelled human nature.”

Edward O. Wilson book On Human Nature

On Human Nature (1978), Ch.3 Development

“Above all I feel that you must resign yourself to taking me as I am, that is, with the congenital quality (or weakness) which ever since my childhood has caused my spiritual life to be completely dominated by a sort of profound 'feeling' for the organic realness of the World. At first it was an ill-defined feeling in my mind and heart, but as the years have gone by it has gradually become a precise, compelling sense of the Universe's general convergence upon itself; a convergence which coincides with, and culminates at its zenith in, him in quo omina constant, and whom the Society has taught me to love.”

Pierre Teilhard De Chardin (1881–1955) French philosopher and Jesuit priest

Letter from Cape Town to Father General, Jean-Baptiste Janssens (12 October 1951)

“Data management housekeeping is not the only problem to plague oversimplified approaches to high speed computation. The physical problems which are of practical interest tend to have rather significant complications. Examples of these complications are as follows: boundaries are likely to be irregular; interiors are likely to be inhomogeneous; computations required may be dependent on the states of the variables at each point; propagation rates of different physical effects may be quite different; the rate of convergence, or convergence at all, may be strongly dependent on sweeping through the array along different axes on succeeding passes; etc. The effect of each of these complications is very severe on any computer organization based on geometrically related processors in a paralleled processing system.”

Gene Amdahl (1922–2015) American physicist

Source: Validity of the single processor approach... (1967), p. 483

“New York has been, and will continue to be, a magnet for people from all over the world. This is where the arts, business, research and technology converge to create the world's foremost urban economy.”

Michael Bloomberg (1942) American businessman and politician, former mayor of New York City

http://www.mikebloomberg.com/en/issues/job_creation/mayor_michael_bloombergs_inaugural_speech
New York City

“[…] the nation’s present and future well-being is now threatened by human control over the biosphere including its underlying mechanisms. As a result, a new challenge begets the state’s responsibility: anticipating and preventing future and irreversible degradations, even if it implies severe constraints to the present.”

Dominique Bourg (1953) French philosopher, specialist of sustainability

"For an Ecological Democracy" https://www.greeneuropeanjournal.eu/for-an-ecological-democracy, Green European Journal, 2014.

“We must not suppose any corporeal conjunction or marriage in the case — all which are merely the sportive fables of Poetry; but must hold the father and the producer of that Being as something most divine and super-eminent. Of such a nature is He who is above all things, around whom, and by reason of whom, all things do subsist. But Homer calls him by his father's name, "Hyperion," in order to show that he is independent, and not subjected to any constraint.”

Julian (emperor) (331–363) Roman Emperor, philosopher and writer

Upon the Sovereign Sun (362)

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Simon Conway Morris 28

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