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Quote of the Week
(March 25, 2024)

[Amid the “drowning thermal noise” of the cell] it’s as if there were an active, coordinating agency subsuming all the part-processes and disciplining their separate variabilities so that they remain informed by, and caught up in, the greater unity. The coordination, the ordering, the continual overcoming of otherwise disordering impacts from the environment so as to retain for the whole a particular character or organized way of being, expressively unique and different from other creatures — this is the “more” of the organism that cannot be had from the mere summing of discrete, causal parts.

So the center holds, and this ordering center — this whole that is more than the sum of its parts — cannot itself be just one or some of those parts it is holding together. When the organism dies, the parts are all still there, but the whole is not.

(from Chapter 6, “Context: Dare We Call It Holism?”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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