Quote

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

More quotes by Lewis Thomas

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We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied. At the interior of our cells, driving them, providing the oxidative energy that sends us out for the improvement of each shining day, are the mitochondria, and in a strict sense they are not ours.
Lewis Thomas
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The gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from the rest of life.
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We are educated to be amazed by the infinite variety of life forms in nature. We are, I believe, only at the beginning of being flabbergasted by its unity.
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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.
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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
Lewis Thomas
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Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
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The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
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I will confess that I have no more sense of what goes on in the mind of mankind than I have for the mind of an ant.
Lewis Thomas
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We hanker to go on, even in the face of plain evidence that long, long lives are not necessarily pleasurable in the kind of society we have arranged thus far. We will be lucky if we can postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time.
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It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity, filled to overbrimming as we are with questions, and naturally talented as we are for the asking of clear questions, and then for us to do nothing about, or worse, to try to suppress the questions.
Lewis Thomas
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We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.
Lewis Thomas
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We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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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
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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.
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We need science, more and better science, not for its technology, not for leisure, not even for health or longevity, but for the hope of wisdom which our kind of culture must acquire for its survival.
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Chemical waste products are the droppings of science.
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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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...the life of the planet began the long, slow process of modulating and regulating the physical conditions of the planet. The oxygen in today's atmosphere is almost entirely the result of photosynthetic living, which had its start with the appearance of blue-green algae among the microorganisms.
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We live in a dancing matrix of viruses they dart, rather like bees, from organism to organism, from plant to insect to mammal to me and back again, and into the sea, tugging along pieces of this genome, strings of genes from that, transplanting grafts of DNA, passing around heredity as though at a great party.
Lewis Thomas