The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We still think of human disease as the work of an organized, modernized kind of demonology, in which the bacteria are the… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
As a species, taking all in all, we are still too young, too juvenile, to be trusted. We have spread across the… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We can take some gratification at having come a certain distance in just a few thousand years of our existence as language… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I am a member of a fragile species, still new to the earth, the youngest creatures of any scale, here only a… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
Doctors, dressed up in one professional costume or another, have been in busy practice since the earliest records of every culture on… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
In real life, every field of science is incomplete, and most of them - whatever the record of accomplishment during the last… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well. We are… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
We are a spectacular, splendid manifestation of life. We have language. . . . We have affection. We have genes for usefulness, and usefulness… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“It is not a simple thing to decide where we fit, for at one time or another in our lives we manage to organize… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
It is in our genes to understand the universe if we can, to keep trying even if we cannot, and to be enchanted by… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
If an idea cannot move on its own, pushing it doesn't help; best to let it lie there. — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I do not agree with this century's fashion of running down the human species as a failed try, a doomed sport. At our worst,… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
It would seem to me... an offense against nature, for us to come on the same scene endowed as we are with the curiosity,… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, as in the modern nation-state, we… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
I would send the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach into outer space on the Voyager spacecraft. But that would be boasting. — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most… — Lewis Thomas Copy Share Image
