I do not feel diminished by my kinship to Turing's machine.Stuart Kauffmann: On The Origin of LifeFrom 'The Pattern in the Stone'
In crafting the living world, selection has always acted on systems that exhibit spontaneous order. If I am right, this underlying order, further honed by selection, augurs a new place for us - expected, rather than vastly improbable, at home in the universe in a newly understood way.Frank Lambert: On EntropyFrom the preface to 'At Home in the Universe'.
Entropy is not disorder. Entropy is not a measure of disorder or chaos. Entropy is not a driving force. Energy's diffusion, dissipation, or dispersion in a final state compared to an initial state is the driving force in chemistry. Entropy is the index of that dispersal within a system and between the system and its surroundingsPierre Simon Laplace: On GodFrom "Disorder - A Cracked Crutch For Supporting Entropy Discussions", available at http://www.entropysite.com/cracked_crutch.html. Originally published in: J. Chem. Educ. 2002 79 187-192.
Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.Karl Popper: On the existence of physical reality
The central issue here is realism. That is to say, the reality of the physical world we live in: the fact that this world exists independently of ourselves; that it existed before life existed, acording to our best hypotheses; and that it will continue to exist, for all we know, long after we have all been swept away.Bertrand Russell: On Plato's RepublicI have argued in favour of realism in various places. My arguments are partly rational, partly ad hominem, and partly even ethical. It seems to me that the attack on realism, although intellectually interesting and important, is quite unacceptable, especially after two world wars and the real suffering - avoidable suffering - that was wantonly produced by them; and that any argument against realism which is based on modern atomic theory - on quantum mechanics - ought to be silenced by the memory of the reality of the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (I say this in full admiration for the modern atomic theory and quantum mechanics, and of the scientists who have worked and who are now working in this field.)
Quantum Theory and the Schism in Physics, Unwin Hyman, Preface 1982.
The problem of finding a collection of 'wise' men and leaving the government to them is thus an insoluble one. That is the ultimate reason for democracy.Bertrand Russell: On Plato's Theory of IdeasA History of Western Philosophy, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, page 124.
Any attempt to divide the world into portions, of which one is more 'real' than the other, is doomed to failure.Bertrand Russell: On the Approach to Art, Science, Literature and PhilosophyA History of Western Philosophy, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, page 144.
For my part, I have found that, when I wish to write a book on some subject, I must first soak myself in detail, until all the separate parts of the subject-matter are familiar; then, some day, if I am fortunate, I perceive the whole with all its parts duly interrelated.Günter Wächtershäuser: On SoupsA History of Western Philosophy, Unwin Paperbacks, 1989, page 138.
You can have a soup of anything.During a conversation at the 'Conditions for the emergence of life' conference at the Royal Society in London in 2006, in which I outlined the SimSoup model, and mentioned that the name SimSoup was not intended to suggest only a soup of large molecules as in heterotrophic theories of the Origin of Life; it could also be used to model small molecule theories such as that of Prof. Wächtershäuser