Alan Turing — "The problems of biology can be reduced to physics and chemistry."
The problems of biology can be reduced to physics and chemistry.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Alan Turing
"The problem of consciousness is a difficult one, and I do not have a solution to it."
"It is not easy to devise a game which is fair in this respect between the machine and the man."
"The human mind is a very complicated machine."
"The true nature of intelligence is not to be found in the ability to solve problems, but in the ability to ask the right questions."
"The machine is only as good as the man who programs it."
Details
Attributed, reductionist view, hard to pin down exact wording/source.
Date: Approx. 1950s
ShockingVerification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Living systems, no matter how complex, ultimately obey the same laws that govern non-living matter. There is no mysterious life force separate from science. Growth, reproduction, and biological form can all be explained by molecular interactions, reaction-diffusion dynamics, and physical processes. Understand the underlying chemistry and physics precisely enough, and you have a complete account of life — no special biological principles required beyond what already governs atoms and molecules.
Relevance to Alan Turing
Turing spent his final years working on morphogenesis, publishing his landmark 1952 paper 'The Chemical Basis of Morphogenesis,' which modeled how reaction-diffusion chemical processes generate biological patterns like stripes and spots. He believed nature runs on computable, physical rules — the same conviction behind formalizing computation itself. For Turing, life was a program running on chemistry, continuous with his broader project of showing that mind and nature are mechanistically explicable.
The era
In the early 1950s, biology was being rapidly absorbed into physics and chemistry. Watson and Crick confirmed in 1953 that heredity was a molecular structure, not a metaphysical force. Vitalism — the idea that living things possess some non-physical essence — was collapsing under experimental pressure. Turing wrote at this exact inflection point, when scientists believed the mechanistic program could fully dissolve the boundary between biology and the physical sciences, making life mathematically tractable.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].