Quotessence
Home / Quotes / Quote by Jacques Monod

Quote by Jacques Monod

“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 the root of the prodigious edifice that is evolution... It today is the sole conceivable hypothesis, the only one that squares with observed and tested fact. Stating life began by the chance collision of particles of nucleic acid in the "prebiotic soup."”

Quote by Jacques Monod

Create image

Author

Jacques Monod
Jacques Monod

A renowned biologist and French Nobel laureate, Jacques Monod is known for his research in genetics and molecular biology. He made significant contributions to the discovery of gene regulation and the genetic code. more

You May Also Like

“Every lecture should state one main point and repeat it over and over, like a theme with variations. An audience is like a herd of cows, moving slowly in the direction they are being driven towards. If we make one point, we have a good chance that the audience will take the right direction; if we make several points, then the cows will scatter all over the field. The audience will lose interest and everyone will go back to the thoughts they interrupted in order to come to our lecture.”

IfsShouldStatesMovingScienceOrderInterestLosesChanceAudienceFieldsDrivenRepeatsThemeCowsLecturesVariationHerdsInterruptedRight DirectionGood ChanceMoving Slowly
Book:Indiscrete Thoughts
Create image

“If an event can be produced by a number n of different causes, the probabilities of the existence of these causes, given the event (prises de l'événement), are to each other as the probabilities of the event, given the causes: and the probability of each cause is equal to the probability of the event, given that cause, divided by the sum of all the probabilities of the event, given each of the causes.”

IfsDifferentScienceGivenCausesChanceNumbersExistenceEventsEqualDividedProbability
Author:Pierre-Simon Laplace
Create image

“Quantitative work shows clearly that natural selection is a reality, and that, among other things, it selects Mendelian genes, which are known to be distributed at random through wild populations, and to follow the laws of chance in their distribution to offspring. In other words, they are an agency producing variation of the kind which Darwin postulated as the raw material on which selection acts.”

KindShowsRealityLawNaturalChanceKnownMaterialsPopulationAgencyGenesSelectionDistributionVariationNatural SelectionOffspringRaw Materials
Author:John B. S. Haldane
Create image

“What we still designate as chance, merely depends on a concatenation of circumstances, the internal connection and final causes of which we have as yet been unable to unravel.”

StillsScienceCausesChanceDependsCircumstancesConnectionsFinalsInternals
Book:Force and Matter: Or, Principles of the Natural Order of the Universe. With a System of Morality Based Thereon
Create image

“There is, however, one feature that I would like to suggest should be incorporated in the machines, and that is a 'random element.' Each machine should be supplied with a tape bearing a random series of figures, e.g., 0 and 1 in equal quantities, and this series of figures should be used in the choices made by the machine. This would result in the behaviour of the machine not being by any means completely determined by the experiences to which it was subjected, and would have some valuable uses when one was experimenting with it.”

ShouldMeanArtMadeUseUsedChoicesChanceResultsFiguresEqualElementsMachinesSeriesValuableDeterminedFeaturesQuantityTapeBehaviourChoices Made
Author:Alan Turing
Create image