“Could it not be that the ultimate and most decisive directing processes in organic life are so refined as to be no longer located in the area of causal-mechanical constraints, but in the realm of free events required to make decisions? This is a possibility for thought, even if at first glance a fantastic possibility. It is no wonder that when this possibility was first mentioned, most biologists summarily rejected it. Yet the experiences and experiments of the past ten or twenty years have uncovered a plethora of facts that no longer permit us to view this question as hypothetical but as a decisive, indeed patently and reliably decisive question. What I have suggested is not only a logical possibility, not just a conceivable possibility for discussion, but simply a fact. Organic life is really so. We must accept it as a fact that in its essential and crucial acts, life is directed by processes immanent in the area of nucleo-physical and molecular-physical acausality, where mechanically calculated predictability does not prevail, and where there is no unwinding of a clock-work protected against unpredictable, incalculable events. The ultimate directing acts in organic life occur in the zone of those natural processes where unforeseeable decisions have surprising effects.”

—Pascual Jordan, Das Schöpferische in der Natur (Creativity in Nature), 1949