Survival, in the cool economics of biology, means simply the persistence of one's own genes in the generations to follow.
Lewis ThomasAnts are so much like human beings as to be an embarrasment...They do everything but watch television.
Lewis ThomasWe do not understand much of anything, from... the "big bang" , all the way down to the particles in the atoms of a bacterial cell. We have a wilderness of mystery to make our way through in the centuries ahead.
Lewis ThomasI am entitled to say, if I like, that 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.
Lewis Thomas