François Jacob Quotes

8 Sourced Quotes

What Man seeks, to the point of anguish, in his gods, in his art, in his science, is meaning. He cannot bear the void. He pours meaning on events like salt on his food.

François Jacob
Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.

François Jacob
It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

François Jacob
Science advances metaphorically. It does not proceed in an orthogenic fashion moving inexorably forward in a straight line. It does not radiate along many branches like a growing tree. It moves from one view to another by a large leap, preceded by a radical shift in the scientist's mode of thought.

François Jacob
And one of the deepest, one of the most general functions of living organisms is to look ahead, to produce future as Paul Valéry put it.

François Jacob
If the genetic code is universal, it is probably because every organism that has succeeded in living up till now is descended from one single ancestor. But it is impossible to measure the probability of an event that occurred only once.

François Jacob
Natural selection has no analogy with any aspect of human behavior. However, if one wanted to play with a comparison, one would have to say that natural selection does not work as an engineer works. It works like a tinkerer - a tinkerer who does not know exactly what he is going to produce...

François Jacob
For science, there are many possible worlds; but the interesting one is the world that exists and has already shown itself to be at work for a long time. Science attempts to confront the possible with the actual.

François Jacob