Stuart Kauffman Quotes

• It is my belief that we need a new transnational sustaining 'myth' that can impart value and respect. It is my further belief that we are coming to see our universe and life as creative, without a directing agency. Meaning emerges with life. If this view becomes widespread, it has the promise to become the sustaining myth we need to sustain in turn an emerging global civilization.

  Stuart Kauffman

  Agency, Views, Civilization

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• Yet what is more awesome: to believe that God created everything in six days, or to believe that the biosphere came into being on its own, with no creator, and partially lawlessly? I find the latter proposition so stunning, so worthy of awe and respect, that I am happy to accept this natural creativity in the universe as a reinvention of 'God.'

  Stuart Kauffman

  Believe, Creativity, Six

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• A free society that allows each individual to seek his or her own selfish ends (without deliberately trying to harm anyone else) will produce a state in which everyone's interest is optimized without any individual knowing in advance what that state might be.

  Stuart Kauffman

  Selfish, Knowing, Individuality

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• A couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine are, in real fact, a couple in love walking along the banks of the Seine, not mere particles in motion.

  Stuart Kauffman

  Couple, Real, Facts

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• Evolution is not the enemy of ethics but its first source.

  Stuart Kauffman

  Enemy, Firsts, Ethics

  Stuart A. Kauffman (2010). “Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason, and Religion”, p.260, Basic Books

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• Deep in the chaotic regime, slight changes in structure almost always cause vast changes in behavior. Complex controllable behavior seems precluded.

  Stuart Kauffman

  Causes, Behavior, Structure

  Stuart A. Kauffman (1993). “The Origins of Order: Self Organization and Selection in Evolution”, p.232, Oxford University Press, USA

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• 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

  Numbers, Eight, Pairs

  Stuart Kauffman (1996). “At Home in the Universe: The Search for the Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity”, p.151, Oxford University Press

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