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I can say, if I like, that social insects behave like the working parts of an immense central nervous system: the termite colony is an enormous brain on millions of legs the individual termite is a mobile neurone.

Lewis Thomas

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Lewis Thomas
Age: 80 †
Born: 1913
Born: November 25
Died: 1993
Died: December 3
Medical Writer
Naturalist
Physician
Poet
Writer
Flushing
Long Island
System
Immense
Brain
Central
Working
Behave
Individual
Nervous
Science
Legs
Termite
Social
Enormous
Colony
Like
Parts
Insects
Millions
Mobile

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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Science will...produce the data..., but never the full meaning. For perceiving real significance, we shall need...most of all the brains of poets, [and] also those of artists, musicians, philosophers, historians, writers in general.
Lewis Thomas
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Given the opportunity, under the right conditions, two cells from wildly different sources, a yeast cell, say, and a chicken erythrocyte, will touch, fuse, and the two nuclei will then fuse as well, and the new hybrid cell will now divide into monstrous progeny. Naked cells, lacking self-respect, do not seem to have any sense of self.
Lewis Thomas
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I don't think that the permanence of the individual human soul is an indispensable part of religious thought.
Lewis Thomas
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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
Lewis Thomas
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It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by the act of learning all the way.
Lewis Thomas
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We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours, a kitchen garden until we learn to make our own chlorophyll and float it out in the sun inside plastic mebranes. We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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The body of science is not, as it is sometimes thought, a huge coherent mass of facts, neatly arranged in sequence, each one attached to the next by a logical string. In truth, whenever we discover a new fact it involves the elimination of old ones. We are always, as it turns out, fundamentally in error.
Lewis Thomas
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Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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It is the very strangeness of nature that makes science engrossing. That ought to be at the center of science teaching. There are more than seven-times-seven types of ambiguity in science, awaiting analysis. The poetry of Wallace Stevens is crystal-clear alongside the genetic code.
Lewis Thomas
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When committees gather, each member is necessarily an actor, uncontrollably acting out the part of himself, reading the lines that identify him, asserting his identity.... We are designed, coded, it seems, to place the highest priority on being individuals, and we must do this first, at whatever cost, even if it means disability for the group.
Lewis Thomas
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Given any new technology for transmitting information, we seem bound to use it for great quantities of small talk. We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense.
Lewis Thomas
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We spend our time sending messages to each other, talking and trying to listen at the same time, exchanging information. This seems to be our most urgent biological function it is what we do with our lives.
Lewis Thomas
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Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.
Lewis Thomas
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We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
Lewis Thomas
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The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance
Lewis Thomas
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The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.
Lewis Thomas
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If we have learned anything at all in this century, it is that all new technologies will be put to use, sooner or later, for better or worse, as it is in our nature to do.
Lewis Thomas
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Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.
Lewis Thomas