Word: human
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...conclusions in the tiniest material details that the world can provide. Because he has peered at nature's building blocks more closely than anyone but fellow biologists, and because he can translate his visions more gracefully than anyone but fellow writers, Thomas' good news about the human race is practically unique. Given the pessimistic tenor of our age the good doctor and his message could not have come along at a better time...
...charms of boarding Thomas' train of thought is the puckish delight he takes in turning beliefs or assumptions upside down. The current to-do about the likelihood of cloning humans? Not worth worrying about, Thomas says, and impossible besides. But (and most of his essays pivot merrily on that word) he has a suggestion for those who cannot resist tinkering: "Set cloning aside, and don't try it. Instead go in the other direction. Look for ways to get mutations more quickly, new variety, different songs." Continued genetic errors, after all, enabled the primeval strand...
...what this can tell us about the sensation of thinking." He recommends an experiment, enlisting Johann Sebastian Bach to support his hypothesis: "Put on The St. Matthew Passion and turn the volume up all the way. That is the sound of the whole central nervous system of human beings, all at once...
...mistakenly, take for granted. Why, he muses in The Medusa and the Snail, did people make such a fuss over the test-tube baby in England? The true miracle was, as always, the union of egg and sperm and the emergence of a cell that can grow into a human brain. "The mere existence of that cell," he writes, "should be one of the greatest astonishments of the earth. People ought to be walking around all day, all through their waking hours, calling to each other in endless wonderment, talking of nothing except that cell." Thomas' pyrotechnic conclusion demands...
...brightest minds of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment to be told by any of us how little we know, and how bewildering seems the way ahead. It is this sudden confrontation with the depth and scope of ignorance that represents the most significant contribution of twentieth-century science to the human intellect...