“Evolution often uses this strategy. Indeed, the standard evolutionary practice of increasing the amount of genetic information as organisms increase in complexity is accomplished by doubling part of the genetic material and then allowing the slow specialization of function of the redundant set.”

—  Carl Sagan

Source: The Dragons of Eden (1977), Chapter 7, “Lovers and Madmen” (p. 183)

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 "Evolution often uses this strategy. Indeed, the standard evolutionary practice of increasing the amount of genetic info…" by Carl Sagan?
Carl Sagan photo
Carl Sagan365
American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science ed… 1934–1996

Related quotes

“If the organization is faced with greater uncertainty due to technological change, higher performance standards due to increased competition, or diversifies its product line to reduce dependence, the amount of information processing is increased. The organization must adopt at least one of the four strategies when faced with greater uncertainty.”

Jay R. Galbraith (1939–2014) American business theorist

Source: Designing complex organizations, 1973, p. 26

“Sociobiology is not just any statement that biology, genetics, and evolutionary theory have something to do with human behavior. Sociobiology is a specific theory about the nature of genetic and evolutionary input into human behavior. It rests upon the view that natural selection is a virtually omnipotent architect, constructing organisms part by part as best solutions to problems of life in local environments. It fragments organisms into “traits,” explains their existence as a set of best solutions, and argues that each trait is a product of natural selection operating “for” the form or behavior in question. Applied to humans, it must view specific behaviors (not just general potentials) as adaptations built by natural selection and rooted in genetic determinants, for natural selection is a theory of genetic change. Thus, we are presented with unproved and unprovable speculations about the adaptive and genetic basis of specific human behaviors: why some (or all) people are aggressive, xenophobic, religious, acquisitive, or homosexual.”

Stephen Jay Gould book Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes

"Our Natural Place", p. 243
Hen's Teeth and Horse's Toes (1983)

“A design principle based on the redundancy of functions rather than on the redundancy of parts (Emery, 1967) characterized the underlying organizational philosophy which tended to develop multiple skills in the individual and immensely increase the response repertoire of the group.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

The evolution of socio-technical systems, (1981)

Ronald Fisher photo

“We may consequently state the fundamental theorem of Natural Selection in the form : The rate of increase in fitness of any organism at any time is equal to its genetic variance in fitness at that time.”

Ronald Fisher book The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection

Defining the fundamental theorem of natural selection, Ch. 2, p. 35.
The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930)

Jane Roberts photo

“The genetic systems is not closed, therefore. The genes do not simply hold information without any reference to the body’s living system. It does not exist, then -- the genetic structure -- like some highly complicated mechanism already programmed, started and functioning blindly so that once it is set into operation there is no chance for modification.”

Jane Roberts (1929–1984) American Writer

Session 910, Page 314
Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Volume Two (1986)

“[The law of evolution states that] complexity increases in terms of differentiation and structure.”

Kenneth E. Boulding (1910–1993) British-American economist

Source: 1970s, Ecodynamics: A New Theory Of Societal Evolution, 1978, p. 10 as cited in P.P. Kandelaars (1999) Economic Models of Material-Product Chains for Environmental Policy Analysis. p. 13

Charles Stross photo

“You take after your dad, a high-functioning sociopath with an incurable organic personality disorder. It’s one of the special-sauce variety, the kind with a known genetic cause.
Your uncle Albert was something different, and worse: He was a man of faith.”

Charles Stross book Rule 34

Source: Rule 34 (2011), Chapter 22, “Toymaker: Happy Families” (p. 248)

Steven Pinker photo

“Evolutionary psychology was the organizing framework—the source of “explanatory adequacy” or a “theory of the computation”—that the science of psychology had been missing. Like vision and language, our emotions and cognitive faculties are complex, useful, and nonrandomly organized, which means that they must be a product of the only physical process capable of generating complex, useful, nonrandom organization, namely, natural selection. An appeal to evolution was already implicit in the metatheoretical directives of Marr and Chomsky, with their appeal to the function of a mental faculty, and evolutionary psychology simply shows how to apply that logic to the rest of the mind.”

Steven Pinker (1954) psychologist, linguist, author

Steven Pinker, "Foreword" in: Buss, David M., ed. The handbook of evolutionary psychology. John Wiley & Sons, 2005. p. xiv

“It is an empirical rule that living, evolutionary, psychological, social, etc., systems tend toward increasing differentiation and organization.”

Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972) austrian biologist and philosopher

Attributed to Bertalanffy (1929) in: Julia Kristeva et al. (1971) Essays in Semiotics. p. 200
1920s

Henry Mintzberg photo

“Given the five parts of the organization - operating core, strategic apex, middle line, technostructure, and support staff - we may now ask how they all function together. In fact, we cannot describe the one way they function together, for research suggests that the linkages are varied and complex. The parts of the organization are joined together by different flows - of authority, of work material, of information, and of decision processes”

Henry Mintzberg (1939) Canadian busines theorist

themselves informational
Source: The structuring of organizations (1979), p. 35

Related topics