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One of my fav bits from Lewis Thomas, who was a science communicator / biologist watcher who influenced me a lot: the biggest massive multiplayer game is *language*. We might not realise it but we are all shaping it, through all our utterances https://t.co/3mn4prnaol
This amazing guy - that I never see anybody talk about - pretty much predicted the Internet, in the 70s, by reasoning from first principles and comparing patterns of human thought against the progressive complexity in the evolution of biology
Glad that at least one influential person recognises his genius. If you’re looking for a short and powerful read I recommend Lives Of A Cell: Notes From A Biology Watcher https://t.co/rNi45rxLmg
To complete the earlier thought: 1- life evolves from single cell organisms into large shoals, corals, dense interconnected ecosystems of life 2- thought and consciousness similarly must surely, for similar reasons, go through a similar process- merging, intermingling, fusing
He pointed out, in the 70s, that humanity was already a hive-mind, via media, telegraphs, magazines, books. And he anticipated that he exchanges would get faster, more voluminous, and evolve into higher level “superorganisms”
He had all sorts of other fascinating observations &musings grounded in observations of biology. He described the whole earth as a single cell, protected from destruction by a thin membrane. He pointed out that nation-states are like hostile, selfish individuals incapable of love
Another interesting bit was his description of how some organisms are destroyed by their own immune systems overreacting to a perceived threat, and he couldn’t help but compare it to the fearmongering of the Cold War (which was the dominant existential worry of the time)
I’m really not doing him any justice with these tweets. The man was a poet, and his subjects were biology and humanity. He suggested that if we had to communicate with aliens, we should send them Bach, since our science and tech would probably be embarrassing
Lewis Thomas once described how the Marine Biological Laboratory was a sort of living organism – "internally, the important institutional decisions seem to have been made by a process of accommodation and adaption, with resistable forces always meeting movable objects." Big mood https://t.co/eMOjqHnOwF
huge interliving coral shoals of thought https://t.co/EiduWZPWK7
