A Quote by Barry Commoner

It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance.

Barry Commoner

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Amenable Atomic Atomic Structure Biological Human Inheritance Interests Judgment Laws More Myth Prevailing Production Reflects Social Structure Technology Than Thermodynamics

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Barry Commoner
American - Scientist
May 28, 1917 - September 30, 2012

Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.

Maurice Saatchi

You could make a good case that the history of social life is about the history of the technology of memory. That social order and control, structure of governance, social cohesion in states or organizations larger than face-to-face society depends on the nature of the technology of memory - both how it works and what it remembers. In short, what societies value is what they memorize, and how they memorize it, and who has access to its memorized form determines the structure of power that the society represents and acts from.

Eben Moglen

The human race has today the means for annihilating itself--either in a fit of complete lunacy, i.e., in a big war...or by the careless handling of atomic technology, through a slow process of poisoning and of deterioration in its genetic structure.

Max Born

I believe that we have more capability than any other creature to control our biological inheritance - and we do so most of the time.

Jane Goodall

I have seen the face of this country change in 25 years or 30 years. I have seen a equalization begin to develop - in inheritance laws, tax laws, laws for favoring trade unions, protecting them, and so forth. All these are social changes.

Sidney Buchman

It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation. Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

Joseph Campbell

Each human being is a more complex structure than any social system to which he belongs.

Alfred North Whitehead

Life is the ultimate technology. Machine technology is a temporary surrogate for life technology. As we improve our machines they will become more organic, more biological, more like life, because life is the best technology for living.

Kevin Kelly

The laws of thermodynamics may be regarded as particular cases of more general laws, applicable to all such states of matter as constitute Energy , or the capacity to perform work, which more general laws form the basis of the science of energetics, a science comprehending, as special branches, the theories of motion, heat, light , electricity , and all other physical phenomena.

William John Macquorn Rankine

The human's place in the universe will be set in the scheme of evolution, the product of our biological inheritance.

Walter Gilbert

Order derived through submission and maintained by terror is not much of a safe guaranty; yet that is the only "order" that governments have ever maintained. True social harmony grows naturally out of solidarity of interests. In a society where those who always work never have anything, while those who never work enjoy everything, solidarity of interests is non-existent; hence social harmony is but a myth.... Thus the entire arsenal of governments - laws, police, soldiers, the courts, legislatures, prisons - is strenuously engaged in "harmonizing" the most antagonistic elements in society.

Emma Goldman

The only weapon we have to oppose the bad effects of technology is technology itself. There is no other. We can't retreat into a nontechnological Eden which never existed...It is only by the rational use of technology to control and guide what technology is doing that we can keep any hopes of a social life more desireable than our own: or in fact of a social life which is not appalling to imagine.

C.P. Snow

What is needed now is a transformation of the major systems of production more profound than even the sweeping post-World War II changes in production technology.

Barry Commoner

Our sexual self is a complex combination of our social, cultural, and biological inheritance.

Pepper Schwartz

These studies resulted eventually in a complete sequence analysis of the complex from several species, and in the atomic resolution structure of the F catalytic domain of the enzyme from bovine mitochondria, giving new insights into how ATP is made in the biological world.

John E. Walker

Nonconformity is an empty goal, and rebellion against prevailing opinion merely because it is prevailing should no more be praised than acquiescence to it. Indeed, it is often a mask for cowardice, and few are more pathetic than those who flaunt outer differences to expiate their inner surrender.

William H. Whyte

A Quote by Barry Commoner

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