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" We are built to make mistakes, coded for error. "
Lewis Thomas
Mistakes
Built
Make
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" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into war, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves, engage in child labour, exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television. "
Lewis Thomas
Information
War
Television
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
Time
Day
Best
" 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
" 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
" Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath. "
Lewis Thomas
Path
You
Woods
" 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
" Human language... prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. "
Lewis Thomas
Human
Us
Matter
" We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch. "
Lewis Thomas
Touch
Whatever
Wherever
" 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
" We tend to think of our selves as the only wholly unique creations in nature, but it is not so. Uniqueness is so commonplace a property of living things that there is really nothing at all unique about it. A phenomenon can't be unique and universal at the same time. "
Lewis Thomas
Unique
Time
Think
" 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
" 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
" The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. "
Lewis Thomas
Nature
Most
Ignorant
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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
" 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