“We are only saved by music from being overwhelmed by nonsense... [by] great quantities of small talk.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get. Most of all, we need to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The uniformity of the earth's life, more astonishing than its diversity... we still share genes around, and the resemblance of the enzymes of grasses to those of whales is a family resemblance.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“Nature abhors a long silence.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“Evolution is still an infinitely long and tedious biologic game, with only the winners staying at the table, but the rules are beginning to look more flexible.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“A poet is, after all, a sort of scientist, but engaged in a qualitative science in which nothing is measurable... Gauging the fit, he can meticulously place pieces of the universe together, in geometric configurations that are as beautiful and balanced as crystals.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“I could be taken for a very large, motile colony of respiring bacteria, operating a complex system of nuclei, microtubules, and neurons for the pleasure and sustenance of their families, and running, at the moment, a typewriter.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“Nor is it a new thing for Man to invent an existence that he imagines to be above the rest of life; this has been his most consistent intellectual exertion down the millennia. As illusion, it has never worked out to his satisfaction in the past, any more than it does today.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The oldest, easiest to swallow idea was that the earth was man's personal property, a combination of garden, zoo, bank vault, and energy source, placed at our disposal to be consumed, ornamented, or pulled apart as we wished.”

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“it is illusion to think that there is anything fragile about the life of the earth... We are the delicate part, transient and vulnerable as cilia.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“A good case can be made for our nonexistence as entities... We are shared, rented, occupied... Our genomes are catalogs of instructions from all kinds of sources in nature... I cannot feel as separate an entity as I did before I was told these things”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“We will be lucky if we an postpone the search for new technologies for a while, until we have discovered some satisfactory things to do with the extra time... to take the place of sitting on the porch re-examining one's watch.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“the habit has become an addiction: we are hooked on living... We cannot think of giving it up, even when living loses its zest—even when we have lost the zest for zest.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“We may be about to discover that dying is not such a bad thing to do after all... It is, after all, the most ancient and fundamental of biologic functions.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“the gift of language is the single human trait that marks us all genetically, setting us apart from all the rest of life. Language is, like nest-building or hive-making, the universal and biologically specific activity of human beings... We cannot be human without it.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“In the same sense that our judicial system presumes us to be innocent until proved guilty, a medical-care system may work best if it starts with the presumption that most people are healthy.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“All of today’s DNA, strung through all the cells of the earth, is simply an extension and elaboration of [the] first molecule.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“Animals have genes for altruism, and those genes have been selected in the evolution of many creatures because of the advantage they confer for the continuing survival of the species.”

from Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1984)

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“Animals, even plants, lie to each other all the time... What is it that enables certain flowers to resemble nubile insects, or opossums to play dead, or female fireflies to change the code of their flashes in order to attract, and then eat, males of a different species?... we could restrict the research to them, putting off the real truth about ourselves for the several centuries we need to catch our breath.”

from Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1984)

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“Ants are so much like human beings as to be an embarrassment. They farm fungi, raise aphids as livestock, launch armies into wars, use chemical sprays to alarm and confuse enemies, capture slaves…. They exchange information ceaselessly. They do everything but watch television.
'”

from On Societies as Organisms (1974)

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“As evolutionary time is measured, we have only just turned up and have hardly had time to catch breath, still marveling at our thumbs, still learning to use the brand-new gift of language. Being so young, we can be excused all sorts of folly and can permit ourselves the hope that someday, as a species, we will begin to grow up.”

from Search for Solutions (1980)

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“the process of aging may be due to the cumulative effect of imprecision, a gradual degrading of information. It is not a system that allows for deviating... Cells are required to stick precisely to the point. Any ambiguity, any tendency to wander from the matter at hand, will introduce grave hazards for the cells, and even more for the host in which they live.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“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.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“awareness exists in all the individual creatures on the planet — worms, sea urchins, gnats, whales, subhuman primates, superprimate humans, the lot. I can say this because we do not know what we are talking about: consciousness is so much a total mystery for our own species that we cannot begin to guess about its existence in others.”

from Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler’s Ninth Symphony (1984)

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“Hypothesis is the heart which no man with right purpose wears willingly upon his sleeve.”

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“It is not so bad being ignorant if you are totally ignorant; the hard thing is knowing in some detail the reality of ignorance”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“Mistakes are at the very base of human thought feeding the structure like root nodules. If we were not provided with the knack of being wrong, we could never get anything useful done.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“Montaigne simply turns his mind loose and writes whatever he feels like writing. Mostly, he wants to say that reason is not a special, unique gift of human beings, marking us off from the rest of nature.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“Science is founded on uncertainty. Each time we learn something new and surprising, the astonishment comes with the realization that we were wrong before.”

from Discover Magazine (1980)

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“Statistically, the probability of any one of us being here is so small that you would think the mere fact of existence would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise. We are alive against the stupendous odds of genetics, infinitely outnumbered by all the alternates who might, except for luck, be in our places.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The capacity to blunder slightly is the real marvel of DNA. Without this special attribute, we would still be anaerobic bacteria and there would be no music.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“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.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“The greatest achievements in the science of this [twentieth] century are themselves the sources of more puzzlement than human beings have ever experienced. Indeed, it is likely that the twentieth century will be looked back at as the time when science provided the first close glimpse of the profundity of human ignorance. We have not reached solutions; we have only begun to discover how to ask questions.”

from Discover Magazine (1980)

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“The most intensely social animals can only adapt to group behavior. Bees and ants have no option when isolated, except to die. There is really no such creature as a single individual; he has no more life of his own than a cast off cell marooned from the surface of your skin.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“We are at our human finest, dancing with our minds, when there are more choices than two. Sometimes there are ten, even twenty different ways to go, all but one bound to be wrong, and the richness of the selection in such situations can lift us onto totally new ground.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“We are, perhaps, uniquely among the earth’s creatures, the worrying animal. We worry away our lives, fearing the future, discontent with the present, unable to take in the idea of dying, unable to sit still.”

from Medusa and the Snail (1974)

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“We owe our lives to the sun... How is it, then, that we feel no gratitude?”

from Earth Ethics (1990)

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“myths are constructed by a universal logic that, like language itself, is as characteristic for human beings as nest-building is for birds.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The mythical animals cataloged in the bestiaries of the world seem, at a casual glance, nothing but exotic nonsense... they are in fact like dreams, and not necessarily bad ones, we may have a hard time doing without them.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“There is a tendency for living things to join up, establish linkages, live inside each other... Any cell – man, animal, fish, fowl, or insect – given the chance and under the right conditions, brought into contact with any other cell, however foreign, will fuse with it.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“colonies of social insects are somehow equivalent to vast, multicreatured organisms, possessing collective intelligence and a gift for adaptation far superior to the sum of the individual inhabitants”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“we haven't yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses... For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility, there is nothing to match a nation. Nations, by law, are solitary, self-centered, withdrawn into themselves... It is this aspect of humanity that has lagged behind the rest of evolution”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The future is too interesting and dangerous to be entrusted to any predictable, reliable agency. We need all the fallibility we can get... to preserve the absolute unpredictability and total improbability of our connected minds.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The human brain is the most public organ on the face of the earth... we pass thoughts around, from mind to mind, so compulsively and with such speed that the brains of mankind often appear, functionally, to be undergoing fusion.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“The whole dear notion of one's own Self—marvelous old free-willed, free-enterprising, autonomous, independent, isolated island of a Self—is a myth.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“language is alive, like an organism... Words are the cells of language, moving the great body, on legs. Language grows and evolves, leaving fossils behind. The individual words are like different species of animals.”

from Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher

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“Hinduism regularly blinded itself from its intense and universally accessible spirituality, inluding the principle of nonviolence, or ahimsa, to attach to the despotic rule of emperors and such societal practices as the caste system.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“Judaism in particular, without a country, a governing institution, a unified culture, a pure ethnic identity, an army, a creed, or a priesthood–a religion that has perfected the art of disagreement, of sustaining arguments of undiminished energy extending across centuries has never given itself completely over to civitas”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“The reasons religions die are many. Some (like Taoism) evolved so extensively from their original form that they gave away their uniqueness.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“Countless Muslims have never abandoned their dream of a world ruled by a unified caliphate, and in the meantime push to establish sharia, or religious law, as the civil law of a nation.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“Christianity, for all its durability and explosive growth, is showing early signs of mortality... It is less a religion than a collection of belief systems.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“This is Christianity's strongest feature: it tirelessly provokes its members to object to prevailing doctrines without having to abandon the faith.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“Lincoln takes his place in a long march of those poets who expose us to our deepest self-contradictions... his Second Inaugural, far from being a celebration of victory, is an admission of national culpability: we ascribed to ourselves an authority we do not properly have.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“What provides Islam its vitality is not just that Muslims find the Quran still endlessly interpretable but that they cannot stop interpreting... Muslims insist that the Quran, to be understood, cannot be translated”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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“the meaning of the words lies not in the darkened part of the page but in the white spaces surrounding the.”

from The Religious Case Against Belief (2008)

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