Generous, but a little dirty

“Jacques wanted to be logical, even purely logical, while he considered me as being mainly intuitive. Which would not have disturbed me if he had not injected into his remarks a bit of irony, even scorn. But it was not enough for him to be logical. Nature also had to be logical, to function according to strict rules. Having once found a ‘soution’ to some ‘problem,’ it had to stick to it from then on, to use it to the end. In every case. In every situation. In every living thing. In the last analysis, for Jacques, natural selection had sculpted each organism, each cell, each molecule down to the tiniest detail. To the point of attaining a perfection ultimately indistinguishable from what others recognized as the sign of divine will. Jacques ascribed Cartesianism and elegance to nature. Hence his taste for unique solutions. For my part, I did not find the world so strict and rational. What amazed me was neither its elegance nor its perfection, but rather its condition: that it was as it was and not otherwise. I saw nature as a rather good girl. Generous, but a little dirty. A bit muddle-headed. Working in a hit-or-miss fashion. Doing what she could with what was at hand. Hence, my tendency to foresee the most varied situations…”

—	Excerpted from The Statue Within, Francios Jacob