Michael Behe Quotes

We don't have a health care system. We have a health care maze.

Unfortunately, the more complex the system, the greater the room for error.

Experience has always shown, and reason also, that affairs which depend on many seldom succeed.

Gloriousness and wretchedness need each other. One inspires us, the other softens us.

It is impossible to make a clear cut between science, religion, and art. The whole is never equal simply to the sum of its various parts.

Despite the fact that Raven and Tack are often fighting, it's impossible to imagine one without the other. They are like two plants that have grown around each other - they strangle and squeeze and support at the same time.

All activity in the brain is driven by other activity in the brain, in a vastly complex, interconnected network.

The man and the woman are not really two separate entities, but the personality of the man needs the supporting qualities of the woman. If those supporting qualities are not there, the man will fall apart. And the same will happen to the woman. She cannot exist only on female qualities, she needs male supporting qualities. So each human being is a composite whole of two polarities which appear opposed to each other but are not really opposed; they are basically, absolutely essential components of each other.

The more we study the major problems of our time, the more we come to realise that they cannot be understood in isolation. They are systemic problems, which means that they are interconnected and interdependent.

Whenever we look at life, we look at networks.

Man! The most complex of creatures, and for this reason the most dependant of creatures. On everything that has formed you, you may depend. Do not balk at this apparent slavery....a debtor to many, you pay for your advantages by the same number of dependencies. Understand that independence is a form of poverty; that many things claim you, that many also claim kinship with you.

If you search the scientific literature on evolution, and if you focus your search on the question of how molecular machines - the basis of life - developed, you find an eerie and complete silence. The complexity of life's foundation has paralyzed science's attempt to account for it; molecular machines raise an as-yet-impenetrable barrier to Darwinism's universal reach.

Management does not know what a system is.

If you take away a rock from a pile of rocks you haven't changed much. It's still a heap of rocks - just a rock or two smaller. Take away a component from the mousetrap and it isn't a mousetrap any more.

No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?

The real bug here is that the design of the system even permits this class of bug. It is unconscionable that someone designing a critical piece of security infrastructure would design the system in such a way that it does not fail safe.

General Systems Theory, a related modern concept [to holism], says that each variable in any system interacts with the other variables so thoroughly that cause and effect cannot be separated. A simple variable can be both cause and effect. Reality will not be still. And it cannot be taken apart! You cannot understand a cell, a rat, a brain structure, a family, a culture if you isolate it from its context. Relationship is everything.

The systems that fail are those that rely on the permanency of human nature, and not its growth and development.

The parts of the universe ... all are connected with each other in such a way that I think it to be impossible to understand any one without the whole.

The computing scientist's main challenge is not to get confused by the complexities of his own making.

Universe is synergetic. Life is synergetic.

Things remain the same because it is impossible to change very much without changing most of everything.

This world cannot explain its own difficulties without the assistance of another.

We have usually no knowledge that any one factor will exert its effects independently of all others that can be varied, or that its effects are particularly simply related to variations in these other factors.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.