The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA. Lewis Thomas More Quotes by Lewis Thomas More Quotes From Lewis Thomas I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell Lewis Thomas cellsnightthinking Science will...produce the data..., but never the Lewis Thomas dataartistreal I maintain, despite the moment's evidence against the claim, that we are born and grow up with a fondness for each other, and we have genes for that. We can be talked out of it, for the genetic message is like a distant music, and some of us are hard-of-hearing. Societies are noisy affairs, drowning out the sound of ourselves and our connection. Lewis Thomas hearinggrowing-upmessages I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought. Lewis Thomas soulreligiousthinking A multitude of bees can tell the time of day, calculate the geometry of the sun's position, argue about the best location for the next swarm. Bees do a lot of close observing of other bees; maybe they know what follows stinging and do it anyway. Lewis Thomas nextlocationsun Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. Lewis Thomas spontaneousnaturalworry Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures. Lewis Thomas rebukescientistcat It is almost always a greater pleasure to come across a semicolon than a period. The period tells you that that is that; if you didn't get all the meaning you wanted or expected, anyway you got all the writer intended to parcel out and now you have to move along. But with a semicolon there you get a pleasant little feeling of expectancy; there is more to come; read on; it will get clearer. Lewis Thomas feelingswritingmoving The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds. That way we can keep open all the options, as we have in the past. Lewis Thomas agencypastinteresting For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation. Lewis Thomas heartlessnessnationsgreed The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. Lewis Thomas effortscienceknowledge Our behavior toward each other is the strangest, most unpredictable, and most unaccountable of all the phenomena with which we are obliged to live. In all of nature, there is nothing so threatening to humanity as humanity itself. Lewis Thomas threateningbehaviorhumanity The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life. Lewis Thomas rest-of-lifemarklanguage Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on earth. It is hard to think of a more dependable or enduring occupation, harder still to imagine any future events leading to its extinction. Lewis Thomas doctorspracticethinking A lot of people fear death because they think that so overwhelming an experience has to be painful, but I've seen quite a few deaths, and, with one exception, I've never known anyone to undergo anything like agony. That's amazing when you think about it. I mean, how complicated the mechanism is that's being taken apart. Lewis Thomas takenmeanthinking We are built to make mistakes, coded for error. Lewis Thomas errorsmistakescience Most of the time I've worked in labs if I didn't encounter something in a week entirely unexpected and surprising I'd consider it a lost week. Lots of that is due to mistakes and stupidity, but it could open a new line of inquiry. Something really good turns up once in a hundred times, but it makes the whole day worthwhile. Lewis Thomas encountersstupiditymistake Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else? Lewis Thomas giving-upselfanimal It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious. Lewis Thomas collectivesmysteriousbehavior We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity. Lewis Thomas educationalnatureinspirational
