Heterogeneity Quotes

“And then there was that key point in On the Origin of Species. That crucial point that somehow both David and before him Francis Galton had missed. What does Darwin say is the best way of building a strong species, of allowing it to endure into the future, to withstand the blows of Chaos in all her mighty forms—flood, drought, rising sea levels, fluctuating temperatures, invasions of competitors, predators, pests?

Variation. Variation in genes, and hence in behavior and physical traits. Homogeneity is a death sentence. To rid a species of its mutants and outliers is to make that species dangerously vulnerable to the elements.”
― Lulu Miller, Why Fish Don’t Exist: A Story of Loss, Love, and the Hidden Order of Life

“The children of the Fulcrum are all different: different ages, different colors, different shapes. Some speak Sanze-mat with different accents, having originated from different parts of the world. One girl has sharp teeth because it is her race's custom to file them; another boy has no penis, though he stuffs a sock into his underwear after every shower; another girl has rarely had regular meals and wolfs down every one like she's still starving. (The instructors keep finding food hidden in and around her bed. They make her eat it, all of it, in front of them, even if it makes her sick.) One cannot reasonably expect sameness out of so much difference, and it makes no sense for Damaya to be judged by the behavior of children who share nothing save the curse of orogeny with her.”
― N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season

“Evolution is an integration of matter and concomitant dissipation of motion during which the matter passes from an indefinite incoherent homogeneity to a definite coherent heterogeneity, and during which the retained motion undergoes a parallel transformation.”
― Herbert Spencer, First Principles

“This heterogeneity [of vasopressin cells] is not by design but by accident. The patterns of gene expression in any neuron are not rigidly fixed by genetic nature, they arise from the unique experience of each cell in its life from birth to adulthood. The innervation of each cell is not predetermined with precision. Axons that reach the supraoptic nucleus may be guided there by developmental cues, but which particular cells each axon contacts is an opportunistic accident. There are mistakes; developmental cues are imperfect and some axons get lost or misled and make inappropriate connections. The brain has to be robust against such imperfection; the cost of doing everything perfectly is too high.
Vasopressin cells are complex, but this does not make them clever, and the differences between cells certainly do mot make each cell uniquely clever. I am not interested in the idea that the brain does clever things because it hosts 100 billion clever machines. The wonder is that it does clever things with machines that are messy, noisy, and imperfect.”
― Gareth Leng, The Heart of the Brain: The Hypothalamus and Its Hormones