Jacques Monod

“A curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understands it.”

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

“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 phenomena science can only look for invariants.”

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

“A totally blind process can by definition lead to anything; it can even lead to vision itself.”

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

“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 are what ought to be. I would say that all traditional philosophies up to and including Marxism have tried to derive the 'ought' from the 'is.' My point of view is that this is impossible, this is a farce.”

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

“Everything comes from experience; yet not from actual experience, reiterated by each individual with each generation, but instead from experience accumulated by the entire ancestry of the species in the course of its evolution.”

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

“What is true for E. coli is also true for the elephant.”

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

“All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its contingency.”

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

"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, the aforementioned paradoxical properties. They are present in living systems only; that is to say, nowhere below the level of the cell."

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

"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.""

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

"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 Avery (confirmed by Hershey), and the elucidation by Watson and Crick of the structural basis of its replicative invariance, are without any doubt the most important discoveries ever made in biology. To this must be added the theory of natural selection, whose certainty and full significance were established only by those later theories."

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)

"There are living systems; there is no'living matter'."

― Jacques Monod (1910-1976)