“My reasons for seeing the universe as meaningful lie in what I perceive as its built-in necessities. Monod stressed the improbability of life and mind and the preponderant role of chance in their emergence, hence the lack of design in the universe, hence its absurdity and pointlessness. My reading of the same facts is different. It gives chance the same role, but acting within such a stringent set of constraints as to produce life and mind obligatorily, not once but many times. To Monod’s famous sentence ‘The universe was not pregnant with life, nor the biosphere with man,’ I reply: ‘You are wrong. They were.'”
Christian de Duve, Vital Dust: Life As A Cosmic Imperative (New York: Basic Books, 1995), 300.
Posted from Waikoloa, Hawaii
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