By separating the function of adaptation from the function of maintaining the integrity of individual genes, sex allows much greater diversity while still keeping genes whole. Sex is not only fun, it is good engineering practice.

When you zap things with light to build quantum computers, you're hacking existing systems. You're hijacking the computation that's already happening in the universe, just like a hacker takes over someone else's computer.

In order to figure out how to make atoms compute, you have to learn how to speak their language and to understand how they process information under normal circumstances.

Science has an uncomfortable way of pushing human beings from center stage. In our prescientific stories, humans began as the focal point of Nature, living on an Earth that was the center of the universe. As the origins of the Earth and of mankind were investigated more carefully, it became clear that Nature had other interests beyond people, and the Earth was less central than previously hoped. Humankind was just one branch of the great family of life, and the Earth is a smallish planet orbiting an unexceptional sun quite far out on one arm of a run-of-the-mill spiral galaxy.

Computers are famous for being able to do complicated things starting from simple programs.

Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would not believe them. I cannot prove that electrons exist..........if you don't believe in them I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf. Electrons speak for themselves.

All physical systems can be thought of as registering and processing information, and how one wishes to define computation will determine your view of what computation consists of.