The DNA molecule was so old that its evolution had essentially finished more than two billion years ago.
That’s the greatest single scientific discovery of the twentieth century. You can’t study anything without changing it. Since Galileo, scientists had adopted the view that they were objective observer...
Si una cosa va mal, tiende a seguir mal. Eso se refleja en el dicho popular que afirma que las desgracias nunca vienen solas. La teoría de la complejidad revela que el dicho popular es acertado. Las d...
Sanders had fought the B-school mentality that she exemplified. After watching these graduates come and go, Sanders had finally concluded that there was a fundamental flaw in their education. They had...
Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.
Linearity is an artificial way of viewing the world. Real life isn’t a series of interconnected events occurring one after another like beads strung on a necklace. Life is actually a series of encount...
Just tell us, Harding said, bent over the wound. Darwin had no idea … That life is so unbelievably complex, Malcolm said. Nobody realizes it. I mean, a single fertilized egg has a hundred thousand gen...
It’s not clear what happened. It’s not clear who did what to whom. That’s the largest category of complaints we see. So far, society’s tended to focus on the problems of the victim, not the problems o...
It suggests to us that behavior of complex animals can change very rapidly, and not always for the better. It suggests that behavior can cease to be responsive to the environment, and lead to decline...
In general, people who aren't in touch with their emotions tend to think their emotions are unimportant.
Human beings are so destructive, Malcolm said. I sometimes think we’re a kind of plague, that will scrub the earth clean. We destroy things so well that I sometimes think, maybe that’s our function. M...
His management philosophy, tempered in his rain-dancing days, was always to give the project to whoever had the most to gain from success--or the most to lose from failure.
Herger said to me, Be thankful, for you are fortunate. I inquired the source of my fortune. Herger said in reply, If you have the fear of high places, then this day you shall overcome it; and so you s...
Herger said to me, Be thankful, for you are fortunate.I inquired the source of my fortune. Herger said in reply, If you have the fear of high places, than this day you shall overcome it; and so you sh...
Having wallowed in a delightful orgy of anti-French sentiment, having deplored and applauded the villains themselves, having relished the foibles of bankers, railwaymen, diplomats, and police, the pub...
For our own species, evolution occurs mostly through our behavior. We innovate new behavior to adapt.
Expectation works in mysterious ways---and totally unconsciously.
Every human society expends tremendous time and energy teaching its children the right way to behave. You look at a simpler society, in the rain forest somewhere, and you find that every child is born...
Even if you don’t believe in any God, you still have to believe in something that gives meaning to your life, and shapes your sense of the world. Such a belief is religious.
Each parasaur produced a large mound of straw-colored spoor. This was accompanied by low trumpeting from each animal in the herd—along with an enormous quantity of expelled flatus, redolent of methane...