The drive to be useful is encoded in our genes. But when we gather in very large numbers, … - Lewis Thomas

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I smoked pot when I was a teenager because other kids were doing it, but I didn't enjoy it that much.

Lewis Thomas

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 seem capable of levels of folly and self-destruction to be found nowhere else in all of nature. But if we keep at it and keep alive, we are in for one surprise after another. We can build structures for human society never seen before, thoughts never heard before, music never heard before.

Gather, Human, Nowhere, Numbers, Persistence, Self

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Music is the effort we make to explain to ourselves how our brains work. We listen to Bach transfixed because this is listening to a human mind.

Brain, Effort, Listen, Make, Music, Work

Good applied science in medicine, as in physics, requires a high degree of certainty about the basic facts at hand, and especially about their meaning, and we have not yet reached this point for most of medicine.

Applied, Hands, Medicine, Physics, Reached, Science

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.

Astonishment, Confounding, Earth, Effort, Knowledge, Science

The greatest of all the accomplishments of 20th century science has been the discovery of human ignorance

Accomplishment, Discovery, Greatest, Human, Ignorance

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

Cloning, Flower, Humans, Science, Sunshine, Worry