Lewis Thomas

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Lewis Thomas
Lewis Thomas

I write essays about biology for the New England Journal. The cells don't mind.

Lewis Thomas
·1974·New Haven, Connecticut

Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive.

Lewis Thomas
·1974·New Haven, Connecticut

A solitary ant, afield, cannot be considered to have much of anything on his mind; indeed, with only a few neurons strung together by fibers, he can't be imagined to have a mind at all, much less a thought. He is more like a ganglion on legs. Four ants together, or ten, encircling a dead moth on a path, begin to look more like an idea. They fumble and shove, gradually moving the food toward the Hill, but as though by blind chance. 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.