Lewis Thomas Quotes About Biology

Quotes about: Biology

• I cannot think of a single field in biology or medicine in which we can claim genuine understanding, and it seems to me the more we learn about living creatures, especially ourselves, the stranger life becomes.

  Lewis Thomas

  Life, Science, Thinking

• The need to make music, and to listen to it, is universally expressed by human beings. I cannot imagine, even in our most primitive times, the emergence of talented painters to make cave paintings without there having been, near at hand, equally creative people making song. It is, like speech, a dominant aspect of human biology.

  Lewis Thomas

  Song, Hands, People

  Lewis Thomas (1990). “A Long Line of Cells Collected Essays”

• Altruism has always been one of biology's deep mysteries. Why should any animal, off on its own, specified and labeled by all sorts of signals as its individual self, choose to give up its life in aid of someone else?

  Lewis Thomas

  Giving Up, Animal, Self

  Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

• Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.

  Lewis Thomas

  Mean, Persistence, Survival

  Lewis Thomas (1984). “Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony”, Bantam

• 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

  Views, People, Survival

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