The only solid piece of scientific truth about which I feel totally confident is that we are profoundly ignorant about nature. Indeed, I regard this as the major discovery of the past hundred years of biology. It is, in its way, an illuminating piece of news… 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.In the blurb for The Medusa and the Snail, it says that listening to this book on audio “is like being fortunate enough to sit next to the most intelligent and witty guest at a dinner party“, and that is a very apt analogy. Listening to the thoughts of Lewis Thomas – a poet-physician and old-fashioned public intellectual – on subjects ranging from the horrific symbiotic nature of the two title creatures to public health policy to word origins can be inconsistently interesting but constantly impressive. Thomas had a sense of humour, dry and ironic, that made even the most esoteric subjects relatable, and it was most intriguing to me that, forty years after its publication, so much of his thought on science is still relevant today.
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.When Thomas speaks about computers, they are room-sized with vacuum tubes and punch cards, but even at the time he could conceive of their power. And whether talking about computers or the idea of human cloning, he warns of the same danger: mistakes should be built into all human-made systems since it is the mutations and hiccups that have driven everything from evolution to art.
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.While I was fairly bored during an entire essay on word origins which ended on an examination of the word “hubris”, I did enjoy the next essay about the debate that was raging at the time over whether or not scientists should be manipulating viruses at the risk of creating an uncontrollable superbug: with accusations of hubris from one side and anti-science ignorance from the other. As I see this debate is still playing out today, it was interesting to me to see where Thomas landed (the pursuit of all knowledge is noble but there should be limits to how it is used).
As with the essay on etymology, there was a strange one on punctuation:
Sometimes you get a glimpse of a semicolon coming, a few lines farther on, and it is like climbing a steep path through woods and seeing a wooden bench just at a bend in the road ahead, a place where you can expect to sit for a moment, catching your breath.But for every essay like this that seemed like private musings (or like how to imagine that the universe is revolving around the tip of your pencil), there was one like an examination of warts, of all things, that had me completely fascinated. The breadth of the subject matter in this small collection ought to guarantee that there's something interesting for everyone within it, and I'd have to agree that Lewis Thomas would have made an ideal dinner guest; if only because you could turn your attention to someone else if Thomas had started rambling about something less than fascinating.
