Francois Jacob Quotations

For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future.

Evolution is a tinkerer.

I had turned my anxiety into my profession.

The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race without end... What mattered more than the answers were the questions... For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future... I had turned my anxiety into my profession.

It is natural selection that gives direction to changes, orients chance, and slowly, progressively produces more complex structures, new organs, and new species. Novelties come from previously unseen association of old material. To create is to recombine.

Myths and science fulfill a similar function: they both provide human beings with a representation of the world and of the forces that are supposed to govern it. They both fix the limits of what is considered as possible.

The Place of No Shadows, in Isaac Asimovs Science Fiction Magazine (1990) In our Universe, matter is arranged in a hierarchy of structures by successive integrations.

One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead... to produce future.

I think I’ve just thought up something important,

It is hope that gives life meaning. And hope is based on the prospect of being able one day to turn the actual world into a possible one that looks better.