Lewis Thomas

Lewist Thomas was born in 1913. Princeton and Harvard educated, he was a physician and educator. He served as president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center from 1973 to 1980. He also was the author of To Err is Human , The Youngest Science, and The Lives of a Cell. (1979) Dr. Lewis died in 1994.

The greatest single achievement of nature to date was surely the invention of the molecule DNA. The Medusa and the Snail, 1974.

 

All of today's DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of (the) first molecule. Ibid.

 

We have come a long way on that old molecule. Ibid.

 

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. Ibid.

 

It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant . . . Ibid.

 

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. Ibid.

 

As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up. From the introduction to The Search for Solutions by Horace Freeland Judson, 1980.

 

We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Ibid.

 

The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Ibid.

 

A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable. Ibid.

 

We have dominated and overruled nature, and from now on the earth is ours . . . We will build Scarsdale on Mount Everest. Ibid.

 

The overwhelming astonishment, the queerest structure we know about so far in the whole universe, the greatest of all cosmological scientific puzzles, confounding all our efforts to comprehend it, is the earth. Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. 1983.

 

The central task of science is to arrive, stage by stage, at a clearer comprehension of nature, but this does not mean, as it is sometimes claimed to mean, a search for mastery over nature. Ibid.

 

planet&emdash;worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others. Ibid.

 

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. Ibid.

 

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. Ibid.

 

What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble nubile insects, or opossums to play dead, or female fireflies to change the code of their flashes in order to attract, and then eat, males of a different species? Ibid.

 

Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species. Ibid.

 

. . . 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. Ibid.