Quote of the Day

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Quote of the Day

Public opinion is a weak tyrant compared with our own private opinion. What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates, his fate.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Wisdom Of The Week

I have been reading Anya Plutynski's book Explaining Cancer; it is one of the richest and well-researched books on the current state of cancer research and to understand, why it is so difficult to find a cure. Her background in philosophy brings more rigor to the book. It is not an easy read but you will learn so much from it.

One of the central aims of this book is to argue that understanding cancer requires both the decomposition of parts and processes involved in cancer at the cell and molecular levels ("drilling down") and "scaling up" to the macro level, or examining cancer's historical origins and remote causes, complex organizations, and dynamics.

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How does all this bear on cancer and on explaining and understanding cancer? Steve Frank once said (personal communication) that for a cancer scientist with interests in metabolic features of cancer, everything of interest in cancer can be explained in metabolism, whereas for a cancer scientist interested in stem cells, everything of interest in cancer can be explained by stem cells. Frank was making a joke, but it is a telling one; each scientist investigating one of the several ways of decomposing the casual factors of relevance to cancer is likely to see such factors as centrally important to many, if not all, aspects of cancer initiation and progression. But of course, no one scientist is going to give us the whole picture. This could be predicted for descriptively and interactionally complex systems. This interactive complexity of organisms has massive implications both for our study of living things and for our study of how they break down.

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Cancer is a vivid instance of a descriptively and interactively complex causal process. Thinking about cancer as an instance of an interactively complex system can help us think more carefully about how to do science, as well as the nature of the biological world and ourselves as part of that world. 

Quote of the Day

I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand at the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line.

- Henry David Thoreau, Walden

Quote of the Day

The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

- John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, I

Quote of the Day

Civilization is a hopeless race to discover remedies for the evils it produces.

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau

Quote of the Day

The first man who, having enclosed a piece of ground, bethought to himself of saying “This is mine”, and found people simple enough to believe him, was the real founder of civil society. How many crimes, wars, murders; how much misery and horror the human race would have been spared if someone had pulled up the stakes and filled the ditch and cried out to his fellow men: ‘Beware of listening to this imposter. You are lost if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong to everyone and that the earth itself belongs to no one!

- Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality, II, trans. G. D. H. Cole

Quote of the Day

To think of humans as freedom-loving, you must be ready to view nearly all of history as a mistake.

- John Gray, The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths

Quote of the Day

It is time that we had uncommon schools, that we did not leave off our education when we begin to be men and women. It is time that villages were universities, and their elder inhabitants the fellows of universities, with leisure -- if they are, indeed, so well off -- to pursue liberal studies the rest of their lives.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau

Quote of the Day

To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.

- Walden, Henry David Thoreau