Stuart Kauffman - At home in the universe (1995)

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One of the most important presuppositions of Darwin's entire thesis is gradualism, the idea that mutations to the genome can cause minor variations in the organism's properties, which can be accumulated piecemeal, bit by bit, over the eons to create the complex order found in the organisms we observe.

Stuart Kauffman
It is not necessary that a specific set of 2000 enzymes be assembled... Whenever a collection of chemicals contains enough different kinds of molecules, a metabolism will crystallize from the broth.

Stuart Kauffman
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
Pick up a pinecone and count the spiral rows of scales. You may find eight spirals winding up to the left and 13 spirals winding up to the right, or 13 left and 21 right spirals, or other pairs of numbers. The striking fact is that these pairs of numbers are adjacent numbers in the famous Fibonacci series

Stuart Kauffman
Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the sere Earth some 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave.

Stuart Kauffman
Algorithms are a set of procedures to generate the answer to a problem. An example is the algorithm to find the solution to a quadratic equation, which most of us were taught while learning algebra. Not only was I taught the algorithm, but our entire class was invited to tattoo it on our stomachs so that we could solve quadratic equations by rote.

Stuart Kauffman
Paradise has been lost, not to sin, but to science.

Stuart Kauffman