Chance and Necessity

Chance And Necessity


Chance and Necessity: Essay on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (French: Le Hasard et la Nécessité: Essai sur la philosophie naturelle de la biologie moderne) is a 1970 book by Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod, interpreting the processes of evolution to show that life is only the result of natural processes by "pure chance". It has been described as a "manifesto of materialist biology in the most reductivist sense". The basic tenet of this book is that systems in nature with molecular biology, such as enzymatic biofeedback loops can be explained without having to invoke final causality.

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Famous quotes containing the words chance and, chance and/or necessity:

    There is no chance and anarchy in the universe. All is system and gradation. Every god is there sitting in his sphere.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Can it be that chance has made me one of those women so immersed in one man that, whether they are barren or not, they carry with them to the grave the shriveled innocence of an old maid?
    Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)

    Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.
    David Hume (1711–1776)