Home
Authors
Tags
App
Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App
" Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species. "
Lewis Thomas
Animals
Altruism
Evolution
Related Quotes:
" The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology. "
Lewis Thomas
Song
Creative
Music
" Having long suspected that there was something alive in there, running the place, separate from everything else, absolutely individual and independent, we've celebrated by giving it a real name. My self. "
Lewis Thomas
Long
Self
Name
" Very few recognize science as the high adventure it really is, the wildest of all explorations ever taken by human beings, the chance to glimpse things never seen before, the shrewdest maneuver for discovering how the world works. "
Lewis Thomas
Adventure
World
Chance
" The dilemma of modern medicine, and the underlying central flaw in medical education and, most of all, in the training of interns, is the irresistible drive to do something, anything. It is expected by patients and too often agreed to by their doctors, in the face of ignorance. "
Lewis Thomas
Training
Education
Medical
" Worrying is the most natural and spontaneous of all human functions. "
Lewis Thomas
Most
Spontaneous
Natural
" 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
Culture
Busy
Practice
" Much of today's public anxiety about science is the apprehension that we may forever be overlooking the whole by an endless, obsessive preoccupation with the parts. "
Lewis Thomas
Forever
Anxiety
Today
" At this early stage in our evolution, now through our infancy and into our childhood and then, with luck, our growing up, what our species needs most of all, right now, is simply a future. "
Lewis Thomas
Childhood
Growing Up
Now
" Once you have become permanently startled, as I am, by the realization that we are a social species, you tend to keep an eye out for the pieces of evidence that this is, by and large, good for us. "
Lewis Thomas
Become
You
Evidence
" 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
Live
Humanity
Most
" The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not at all mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature. "
Lewis Thomas
Task
Search
Science
" Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. "
Lewis Thomas
Human
Us
Matter
" Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow. "
Lewis Thomas
Survival
Cool
Economics
" We are built to make mistakes, coded for error. "
Lewis Thomas
Mistakes
Built
Make
" I won't compare ants and people, but ants give us a useful model of how single members of a community can become so organized that they end up resembling, in effect, one big collective brain. Our own exploding population and communication technology are leading us that way. "
Lewis Thomas
Community
Technology
Communication
" Any species capable of producing, at this earliest, juvenile stage of its development... the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, cannot be all bad. "
Lewis Thomas
Juvenile
Bad
Development
" I don't want to be reincarnated, that's for sure. When you've had rewarding experiences in your life - a loving family, friends - you don't need additional reassurances that you're going to do something with a new cast of characters. I'd just as soon pass. "
Lewis Thomas
Loving
Family
Need
" Medical knowledge and technical savvy are biodegradable. The sort of medicine that was practiced in Boston or New York or Atlanta fifty years ago would be as strange to a medical student or intern today as the ceremonial dance of a !Kung San tribe would seem to a rock festival audience in Hackensack. "
Lewis Thomas
Today
Knowledge
Dance
" The earliest sensation at the onset of illness, often preceding the recognition of identifiable symptoms, is apprehension. Something has gone wrong, and a glimpse of mortality shifts somewhere deep in the mind. It is the most ancient of our fears. "
Lewis Thomas
Deep
Recognition
Wrong
" 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
Experience
Fear
People
" It hurts the spirit, somehow, to read the word environments, when the plural means that there are so many alternatives there to be sorted through, as in a market, and voted on. "
Lewis Thomas
Spirit
Through
Word
" The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. "
Lewis Thomas
Nature
Most
Ignorant
" There's really no such thing as the agony of dying. I'm quite sure that pain is shut off at the moment of death. You see, something happens when the body knows it's about to go. Peptide hormones are released by cells in the hypothalamus and pituitary gland. Endorphins. They attach themselves to the cells responsible for feeling pain. "
Lewis Thomas
Feeling
You
Pain
" Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. "
Lewis Thomas
Probability
Surprise
You
" Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind. "
Lewis Thomas
Work
Mind
Listening
" The great secret of doctors, known only to their wives, but still hidden from the public, is that most things get better by themselves; most things, in fact, are better in the morning. "
Lewis Thomas
Medical
Morning
Great
" As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the face of the earth in just a few thousand years, no time at all as evolution clocks time, covering all livable parts of the planet, endangering other forms of life, and now threatening ourselves. "
Lewis Thomas
Earth
Life
Now
" If you want to use a cliche you must take full responsibility for it yourself and not try to fob it off on anon., or on society. "
Lewis Thomas
You
Yourself
Responsibility
" It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits. "
Lewis Thomas
Intelligence
Thinking
Together
" We are told that the trouble with modern man is that he has been trying to detach himself from nature... In this scenario, Man comes on as a stupendous lethal force, and the Earth is pictured as something delicate, like rising bubbles at the surface of a country pond, or flights of fragile birds. "
Lewis Thomas
Man
Birds
Earth