Here are some memorable aphorisms that help to frame the discussion in Behavior and Culture in One Dimension:
“There are no ‘absolute phenomena’ in biology. Everything is time bound and space bound.”
—Max Delbrück, 1949
“If we are going to explain the universe in terms of blind physical forces, those blind physical forces are going to have to be deployed in a very peculiar way.”
—Richard Dawkins, 1983
“How does symbolic information actually get control of physical systems?”
—Howard Pattee, 2007
“It is this problem, the problem of ‘sequentialization’, which is the crux of the matter.”
—Francis Crick, 1958
“Biological specificity is fundamentally the same, no matter where it is encountered.”
—Carl Woese, 1973
“If the mind is a machine, then anyone can control it—anyone, that is, who knows the code and has access to the machinery.”
—Shelley Adamo, 2012
“We can adopt a uniform conceptual architecture for all levels, viewing the organism as a network of interacting cells in the same way we view the cell as a network of interacting molecules.”
—Sydney Brenner, 2010
“So far as we know, the basic design of every microorganism larger than a virus is precisely as von Neumann said it should be.”
—Freeman Dyson, 1979
“Consciousness is still a magnificent set of puzzles, but appears as less of a flatfooted mystery when we think about the fruits of cognition with [James] Gibson’s help.”
—Daniel Dennett, 2017
“It would be impossible to imagine a purely oral society as a member of the United Nations.”
—Jack Goody, 2000
“In enabling mechanism to combine together general symbols in successions of unlimited variety and extent, a uniting link is established between the operations of matter and the abstract mental processes.”
—Ada Lovelace, 1843
“That biological macromolecules are allosteric is one of the most important discoveries in all of biology.”
—Carl Woese, 1973
“Why don’t I use a recipe to make a cake? The answer is, Because the recipe uses me to make the cake.”
—F. T. Cloak, Jr., 1975
“There is a sense in which languages are insensitive to the existence of their users as conscious beings.”
—Nikolaus Ritt, 2004
“In its evolutionary role the gene inhabits eternity, or at least geological time. Its companions in the river of evolutionary time are other genes, and the fact that in any one generation they inhabit individual bodies can almost be forgotten.”
—Richard Dawkins, 1990
“If you want to do things specifically in biology you have to pay for it in sequence information. But if it doesn’t matter, why bother to pay for it?”
—Sydney Brenner, 2009
“States became huge social interactors whose properties are, in crucial aspects, defined by their component replicators: the legal system and the written codification of law.”
—Geoffrey Hodgson & Thorbjorn Knudsen, 2010
“In the evolutionary course there have been a few great junctures, times of major evolutionary advance. Their hallmark is the emergence of vast, qualitatively new fields of evolutionary potential, and symbolic representation tends to underlie such evolutionary eruptions.”
—Carl Woese, 2002
“The genes say ‘Thou shalt covet;’ ultrasocial human culture says (or used to say) ‘Thou shalt not covet’”
—Donald Campbell, 1982
“Human language must have been produced by evolution. Evolutionary forces— and that means natural selection, the only evolutionary force we know of—could have produced it only if it produced effects.”
—C.H. Waddington, 1972