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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
Legs
Termite
Science
Colony
Social
Enormous
Insects
Like
Parts
Mobile
Millions
Immense
System
Central
Brain
Behave
Working
Nervous
Individual

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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
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For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.
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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.
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We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
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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.
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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.
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Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of nature.
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Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves... They do everything but watch television.
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We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
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We are spectacular splendid manifestations of life. We have language. We have affection. And finally, and perhaps best of all, we have music.
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It's just plain learning something that you didn't know. There is a real aesthetic experience in being dumbfounded.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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If we are to be destroyed we will do it ourselves by warfare with thermonuclear weaponry.
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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.
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