Jacques Monod Quotes

23 quotes in 576 categories

• Evolution in the biosphere is therefore a necessarily irreversible process defining a direction in time; a direction which is the same as that enjoined by…
• Even today a good many distinguished minds seem unable to accept or even to understand that from a source of noise natural selection alone and…
• In science there is and will remain a Platonic element which could not be taken away without ruining it. Among the infinite diversity of singular…
• The future of mankind is going to be decided within the next two generations, and there are two absolute requisites: We must aim at a…
• A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.
• The fundamental biological variant is DNA. That is why Mendel's definition of the gene as the unvarying bearer of hereditary traits, its chemical identification by…
• Among all the occurrences possible in the universe the a priori probability of any particular one of them verges upon zero. Yet the universe exists;…
• Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. Neither his…
• ...the scientific attitude implies what I call the postulate of objectivity-that is to say, the fundamental postulate that there is no plan, that there is…
• There are living systems; there is no living "matter." No substance, no single molecule, extracted and isolated from a living being possess, of its own,…
• One of the great problems of philosophy, is the relationship between the realm of knowledge and the realm of values. Knowledge is what is; values…
• Every living being is also a fossil. Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins, it bears the traces if…
• One may well find oneself beginning to doubt whether all this could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by natural selection,…
• Man's destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.
• Armed with all the powers, enjoying all the wealth they owe to science, our societies are still trying to practice and to teach systems of…
• Chance alone is at the source of every innovaton, of all creation in the biosphere. Pure chance, only chance, absolute but blind liberty is at…
• Chance and necessity.
• Biology occupies a position among the sciences at once marginal and central. Marginal because-the living world constituting but a tiny and very "special" part of…
• A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.
• What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant.

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