Jacques Monod.
Chance and Necessity.
Collins. 1971
What is the origin of life? How did man develop? What controls evolution?
These are the questions that, incredibly,
molecular biologists and biochemists have answered in the past decade.
For with the decipherment of the genetic code
and the unravelling of the molecular structure of DNA and RNA
the elementary mechanisms of evolution have at last been precisely identified.
But if man is an accident based on chance and that accident is perpetuated by the necessity of chemical reactions, what values and ethics can he develop by which to live?
It is with this problem, and the biological evidence and conclusions that have forced it into prominence, that Jacques Monod – himself one of the founders of molecular biology and Nobel prize-winner – is concerned.
p150.
Every living being is also a fossil.
Within it, all the way down to the microscopic structure of its proteins,
it bears the traces if not the stigmata of its ancestry.