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“NOW THROUGH THE VERY UNIVERSALITY of its structures, starting with the code, the biosphere looks like the product of a unique event,” Jacques Monod wrote in 1970. “The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man. Our number came up in the Monte Carlo game. Is it any wonder if, like a person who has just made a million at the casino, we feel a little strange and a little unreal?”
His rule is “All life evolves by the differential survival of replicating entities.” Wherever there is life, there must be replicators. Perhaps on other worlds replicators could arise in a silicon-based chemistry—or in no chemistry at all.
proselytizing
teleological.”
ethologist
fecundity:
phylogeny—
Medical practice, too, experiences “surgical fads” and “iatroepidemics”—epidemics caused by fashions in treatment—like the iatroepidemic of children’s tonsillectomies that swept the United States and parts of Europe in the mid-twentieth century, with no more medical benefit than ritual circumcision.
When a jingle lingers in our ears, or a fad turns fashion upside down, or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came, who is master and who is slave?
“Chance is only the measure of our ignorance,”
“Any one who considers arithmetical methods of producing random digits is, of course, in a state of sin,”
stochastic
The number 593 is more interesting than it looks; it happens to be the sum of nine squared and two to the ninth—thus a “Leyland number” (any number that can be expressed as xy + yx).
googol).
appurtenances
prosaic:
His ingenious algorithm, which broke the field wide open, is known by him simply as the factoring algorithm, and by everyone else as Shor’s algorithm.
daguerreotype
dilettantish,
tumultuous
surcease.
senescence
aphorism
