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Quotes from The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher — Lewis Thomas

1913–1993 United States

← All quotes by Lewis Thomas

11 quotes

Everything here is alive thanks to the living of everything else.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Left to ourselves, mechanistic and autonomic, we hanker for friends.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Usefulness may turn out to be the hardest test of fitness for survival, more important than aggression, more effective, in the long run, than grabbiness.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

You can’t do this and keep a straight face.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Everyone says, stay away from ants. They have no lessons for us; they are crazy little instruments, inhuman, incapable of controlling themselves, lacking manners, lacking souls.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

We are endowed with genes which code out our reaction to beavers and otters, maybe our reaction to each other as well.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Maybe altruism is our most primitive attribute out of reach, beyond our control.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behavior control, genetic engineering, transplanted heads, computer poetry and the unrestrained growth of plastic flowers.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Be individuals, solitary and selfish, is the message. Altruism, a jargon word for what used to be called love, is worse than weakness, it is sin, a violation of nature. Be separate. Do not be a social animal.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

As a people we have become obsessed with Health. There is something fundamentally, radically unhealthy about all this. We do not seem to be seeking more exuberance in living as much as staving off failure, putting off dying. We have lost all confidence in the human body.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

I agree that you might clone some people who would look amazingly like their parental cell donors, but the odds are that they’d be almost as different as you or me, and certainly more different than any of today’s identical twins.

The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher (1979)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Lewis Thomas (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.