What Is Life? Quotes

“The life forms that survive natural selection persist because they work, not necessarily because they do things in the most efficient or straightforward way possible.”
― Paul Nurse, What Is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology

“As Sydney Brenner observed, ‘Mathematics is the art of the perfect. Physics is the art of the optimal. Biology, because of evolution, is the art of the satisfactory.”
― Paul Nurse, What Is Life?: Five Great Ideas in Biology

“This is one of the big discoveries of twenty-first century genetics: our genomes, each three billion DNA ‘letters’ long, are very similar, across genders, ethnicities, religions and social classes. This is an important equalizing fact that societies across the world should appreciate.”
― Paul Nurse, What is Life?: Understand Biology In Five Steps

“it was widely known that the gene-carrying chromosomes within cells contained DNA, but most biologists thought that DNA was too simple and boring a molecule to be responsible for such a complex phenomenon as heredity.”
― Paul Nurse, What is Life?: Understand Biology In Five Steps

“«Si las matemáticas son el arte de lo perfecto y la física de lo óptimo, la biología no es más que el arte de lo satisfactorio, debido a la evolución».”
― Paul Nurse, ¿Qué es la vida?: Entender la biología en cinco pasos (geoPlaneta Ciencia)