¶ Human Beings & Complex Universe
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Index Entry
Human Beings & Complex Universe:
"We have human beings gradually then, thinking that life is physical; and then gradually getting into chemistry, physics, and biology, and separating these things out, and finally in the biology discovering controls in the design, getting into genetics and the chromosomes, and finding that some of these controls brought about blue eyes. . .and so forth.
"We began to have accelerated generations of other living creatures from which they could make observations to see if by marrying these two–to see what kind of results we could get. Fruit flies work very well; and the tobacco mosaic virus. In that world of viruses and the protein shell where they discovered the DNA/RNA in a world of virology where we have physicists, geneticists, biologists, and mathematicians–and all of them excited by the results they are getting–so excited with the results that none of them are tending to philosophize.
“They are all so specialized; they don’t tend to look at the total significance of it. What had always been thought of as a clear threshold between the animate and the inanimate… but at that level of virus you can call the whole show purely atomic: You could call it purely crystal, absolutely inanimate.”
