“The results of particle physics are in no sense more fundamental then what Alan Turing did in founding the computer science, or what Francis Crick and James Watson did in discovering the secret of life.”

“The DNA revolution led a generation of biologists to believe that the secret of life lay entirely in the structure and function of DNA. This faith is misplaced and the reductionist programme must be supplemented with a new conceptual framework.”

— Harry Rubin (1988), “Molecular Biology Running into a Cul-de-sac?” [6]

“The reductionist hypothesis may still be a topic for controversy among philosophers, but among the great majority of active scientists I think it is accepted without question. The workings of our minds and bodies, and of all the animate or inanimate matter of which we have any detailed knowledge are assumed to be controlled by the same set of fundamental laws, which except under certain extreme conditions we feel we know pretty well.”

“Biology has certainly taken on a whole new aspect from the reduction of genetics to biochemistry and biophysics, which will have untold consequences. So it is not true, as a recent article [2] would have it, that we each should ‘cultivate own valley, and not attempt to build roads over the mountain ranges … between the sciences.’ Rather, we should recognize that such roads, while often the quickest shortcut to another part of our own science, are not visible from the viewpoint of one science alone.

The arrogance of the particle physicist and his intensive research may be behind us (the discoverer of the positron [Carl Anderson] said ‘the rest is chemistry’), but we have yet to recover from that of some molecular biologists, who seem determined to try to reduce everything about the human organism to ‘only’ from the common cold and all mental disease to the religious instinct. Surely there are more levels of organization between human ethology and DNA than there are between DNA and quantum electrodynamics, and each level can require a whole new conceptual structure.”

“In my Reagent’s Lecture ‘More is Different’ (1967), I emphasized the concept of ‘broken symmetry’, the ability of a large collection of simple objects to abandon its own symmetry as well as the symmetries of the forces governing it and to exhibit the ‘emergent property’ of a new symmetry. ‘Emergent’ is a philosophical term going back to the 19th century debates about evolution, implying properties that do not preexist in a system or substrate. Life and consciousness, in this view, are emergent properties. The canonical example was the Bardeen-Cooper-Schrieffer theory of superconductivity, which could be described as broken gauge symmetry.”

“There is one other problem that must be confronted, one associated with the buzz-word ‘emergence’. As we look at nature at levels of greater and greater complexity, we see phenomena emerging that have no counterpart at the simpler levels, least of all at the level of the elementary particles. For instance, there is nothing like intelligence on the level of individual living cells, and nothing like life on the level of atoms and molecules. The idea of emergence was well captured by the physicist Philip Anderson in the title of a 1972 article ‘More Is Different’.”

“The emergence of new phenomena at higher levels of complexity is most obvious in biology and the behavioral sciences, but it is important to recognize that such emergence does not represent something special about life or human affairs; it also happens within physics itself.”

“I think it will be accepted that all ordinary matter obeys simple electrodynamics and quantum theory. We must all start with reductionism, which I fully accept.”

— Philip Anderson (1967), “More is Different”

“For most of its history, and for its most well-known practitioners, physics has been the ultimate reductionist subject. Physicists reduce matter first to molecules, then to atoms, then to nuclei and electrons, then to nucleons and so on—always attempting to reduce complexity to simplicity.”

— Philip Anderson (1991), “Is Complexity Physics? Is it Science? What is It?” [7]

“Of course I am not religious—I don’t in fact see how any scientist who thinks at all deeply can be so. We atheists can . . . argue that, with the modern revolution in attitudes toward homosexuals, we have become the only group that may not reveal itself in normal social discourse.”

— Philip Anderson (2011), More is Different: Notes from a Thoughtful Curmudgeon [9]