Quote

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

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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
Fact
Resemblance
Family
Whales
Facts
Cell
Around
Genes
Stills
Cells
Still
Grass
Enzymes
Looks
Share
Grasses
Take
Parent
Progeny

More quotes by 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.
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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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We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.
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We have come a long way on that old molecule DNA.
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We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?
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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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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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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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On any Tuesday morning, if asked, a good working scientist will tell you with some self-satisfaction that the affairs of his field are nicely in order, that things are finally looking clear and making sense, and all is well. But come back again on another Tuesday, and the roof may have just fallen in on his life's work.
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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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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Selfness is an essential fact of life. The thought of nonselfness, precise sameness is terrifying.
Lewis Thomas
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Cats - a standing rebuke to behavioural scientists . . . least human of all creatures.
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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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
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The most solid piece of scientific truth I know of is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature.
Lewis Thomas
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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
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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
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It is in our collective behavior that we are most mysterious.
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