Science is a victim of its own reductive metaphors: ‘Big Bang,’ ‘selfish gene’ and so on. Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene fitted with the Thatcherite politics of the time. It should actually be the ‘altruistic gene,’ but he’d never have sold as many books with a title like that. Charles Jencks Read Quote
The cell is a city of production centres, each part working away like mad, and it’s co-ordinated. Six trillion cells in a body – you can’t help but be moved. Charles Jencks Read Quote
The rule seems to be that there are no absolutes, that what is rare is prized. Thus, in times of relative affluence, thin models become dominant. Charles Jencks Read Quote
The singular point of beautiful objects, and people, is that they are experienced not as parts, or ratios between cheekbones and chin, but as wholes. The experience of beauty is a perception, but it is one that mixes up various other sensations and makes them converge in a particular way. Charles Jencks Read Quote
Beautiful people are always with us, as evolutionary psychologists and a trip to the news-stand confirm. Charles Jencks Read Quote
I’ve been a lucky man. I’ve only faced one real tragedy: the death of my wife, Maggie, from cancer in 1995. Charles Jencks Read Quote
If you look at any leaf on any tree branch, it’s similar to but not exactly a repetition of the previous branch. So the new science of complexity or showing how an architecture can be produced just as quickly, cheaply and efficiently by using computer production methods to get the slight variation, the self-similarity. Charles Jencks Read Quote
I was already writing about the idea of a ‘multiverse’ in the 1970s, though I might have called it the ‘pluriverse.’ How was I to know it would turn out to be the standard model? Actually, I consider myself an enlightenment fossil. Charles Jencks Read Quote
You have to believe in a placebo or it won’t work, but if it works, it’s obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy. Charles Jencks Read Quote
