Man is the lowest cost, 150 pound, nonlinear, all-purpose
computer system which can be mass produced by unskilled labor.
-- A 1965 NASA, man-in-space report
The agreement of so many kinds of animals in a certain common structure
which seems to be fundamental not only in their skeletons, but also
in the arrangement of the other parts - so that a wonderfully simple
typical form, by the shortening and lengthening of some parts, and
by the suppression and development of others, might be able to produce
an immense variety of species - allows a ray of hope, however faint,
to enter our minds, that here perhaps some result may be obtained,
by the application of the principle of the mechanism of nature (without
which there can be no natural science in general)....
