One of the deepest functions of a living organisms is to look ahead... to produce future.
Francois JacobIt 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.
Francois JacobIt 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.
Francois JacobThe 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.
Francois JacobThe 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.
Francois Jacob