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Lewis Thomas Quotes


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Quotes by Lewis Thomas

Showing 11-20 of 58 Quotes by Lewis Thomas

We are not like the social insects. They have only the one way of doing things and they will do it forever, coded for that way. We are coded differently, not just for binary choices, go or no-go. We can go four ways at once, depending on how the air feels: go, no-go, but also maybe, plus what the hell let's give it a try.

~Lewis Thomas

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It is only when you watch the dense mass of thousands of ants, crowded together around the Hill, blackening the ground, that you begin to see the whole beast, and now you observe it thinking, planning, calculating. It is an intelligence, a kind of live computer, with crawling bits for its wits.

~Lewis Thomas

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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

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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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We are built to make mistakes, coded for error.

~Lewis Thomas

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We leave traces of ourselves wherever we go, on whatever we touch.

~Lewis Thomas

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Of all celestial bodies within reach or view, as far as we can see, out to the edge, the most wonderful and marvellous and mysterious is turning out to be our own planet earth. There is nothing to match it anywhere, not yet anyway.

~Lewis Thomas

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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

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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 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

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Biography

Nationality: American

Type: Scientist

Born: November 25th, 1913

Died: December 3rd, 1993

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