Neri Oxman Quotes

We, as extremely complex creatures, desperately need to know this story of how the universe creates complexity and why complexity means vulnerability and fragility.

To inquire into the origin of life is like seeking the origin of electrical machinery or the origin of music. Every increase in complexity of arrangement, of form, of substance, leads to new and often incalculable properties.

The human race is a zone of living things that should be defined by tracing its confines.

Form and function are a unity, two sides of one coin. In order to enhance function, appropriate form must exist or be created.

People have always asked whether evolution is constantly driving onwards and upwards. Is there always going to be improvement? The answer is no: evolution is a progression of form and function, but it is not purposeful.

The key to why things change is the key to everything.

Since natural selection requires a function to select, an irreducibly complex biological system, if there is such a thing, would have to arise as an integrated unit for natural selection to have anything to act on.

I'm the product of 6 million years of evolution? Come on, man. I crawled out of a swamp yesterday.

The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

If the process of life is about moving toward increased complexity and organization, a sort of sublime unfolding of greater and greater self-organizing systems, then we're actually doing pretty well.

An idea or institution may arise for one reason and be maintained for quite a different reason.

The seed of everything is in everything else.

If you really want to study evolution, you've got go outside sometime, because you'll see symbiosis everywhere!

We are embedded in a biological world and related to the organisms around us.

Theories of evolution must provide for the creative acts which brought such theories into existence.

I still believe in synergy, but I call it natural law.

Nature's patterns sometimes reflect two intertwined features: fundamental physical laws and environmental influences. It's nature's version of nature versus nurture.

You can't even begin to understand biology, you can't understand life, unless you understand what it's all there for, how it arose - and that means evolution.

What evolution tells us is that we are part of a grand, dynamic, and ever-changing fabric of life that covers our planet. Even to a person of faith, in fact especially to a person of faith, an understanding of the evolutionary process should only deepen their appreciation of the scope and wisdom of the creator's work.

Most of our ancestors were not perfect ladies and gentlemen. The majority of them weren't even mammals.

Biology

For my part, I hold it equally impossible for a small shellfish to be produced without generation as for a whale to have its origin from the mud.

Evolution is good for optimising and that is well understood. But evolution also creates things that no one knew were even possible.

The only answer to the endless chains of why, why, why is that the alternatives died

Well I am the one who loves changing from nothing to one.