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" 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
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" 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
" 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
" 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 cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers. "
Lewis Thomas
Worry
Growth
Flowers
" Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. "
Lewis Thomas
Human
Us
Matter
" The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity, is accountable by the high probability that we derived, originally, from some single cell, fertilized in a bolt of lightning as the earth cooled. "
Lewis Thomas
Lightning
More
Earth
" We carry stores of DNA in our nuclei that may have come in, at one time or another, from the fusion of ancestral cells and the linking of ancestral organisms in symbiosis. Our genomes are catalogues of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature, filed for all kinds of contingencies. "
Lewis Thomas
Nature
Carry
Cells
" 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
" We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch. "
Lewis Thomas
Touch
Whatever
Wherever
" 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
" 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
" We're as clever as we think we are, but we'll be a lot cleverer when we learn to use not just one brain but to pool huge numbers of brains. We're at a level technologically where we can share information and think collectively about our problems. We do it in science all the time - there's no reason why we can't do it in other endeavors. "
Lewis Thomas
Problems
Brain
Time
" 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
" Well, biology today as I see it has an amiable look - quite different from the 19th-century view that the whole arrangement of nature is hostile, 'red in tooth and claw.' That came about because people misread Darwin's 'survival of the fittest.' "
Lewis Thomas
People
Red
Survival
" Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvellous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway. "
Lewis Thomas
Edge
Earth
View
" We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language users, but it should be a deeper satisfaction, even an exhilaration, to recognize that we have such a distance still to go. "
Lewis Thomas
Satisfaction
Go
Distance
" My father was a doctor, and I admired him and got along well with him. He took me with him on house calls. We were living in Flushing, which was then a sleepy village of 25,000 - before the subway got there. I've been sure I wanted to be a doctor since I was about 12. "
Lewis Thomas
Father
Me
Village
" 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
" 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
" It is from the progeny of this parent cell that we all take our looks; we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is in fact a family resemblance. "
Lewis Thomas
Family
Whales
Looks
" 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
Future
Interesting
Minds
" In the fields I know best, among the life sciences, it is required that the most expert and sophisticated minds be capable of changing course - often with a great lurch - every few years. "
Lewis Thomas
Capable
Life
Great
" 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
" We habitually engage in meddling with nature. Until this century most of this meddling was good. Witness the preservation of the European countryside. But since then we've smoked it up and littered it and dumped too much in too many waters. I don't think it's our privilege to behave this way. "
Lewis Thomas
Too Much
Think
Nature
" We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try. "
Lewis Thomas
Choices
Hell
Doing
" 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
Stupidity
Time
Mistakes
" The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. "
Lewis Thomas
Nature
Most
Ignorant
" It is a distortion, with something profoundly disloyal about it, to picture the human being as a teetering, fallible contraption, always needing watching and patching, always on the verge of flapping to pieces. "
Lewis Thomas
Pieces
Always
Human
" We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth's creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still. "
Lewis Thomas
Earth
Animal
Worry
" 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