The cloning of humans is on most of the lists of things to worry about from Science, along with behaviour cont... — Lewis Thomas

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.

Author: Lewis Thomas

Insight: There's something wonderfully clarifying about the way Lewis Thomas lumps together genetic engineering with computer poetry and plastic flowers. He's not saying these things are equally scary—he's pointing out how we tend to panic about scientific possibilities in a kind of undifferentiated soup of anxiety. We worry about cloning and also about the weird aesthetics of artificial plants, as though they belong on the same threat level. This matters now because we do exactly this. We catastrophize about AI, cryptocurrency fraud, and whether our phones are tracking us too closely, often without actually distinguishing which deserve urgent attention and which are more about our general unease with things we don't fully understand. Thomas suggests that some of our fears reveal less about actual danger and more about our discomfort with the unfamiliar. Not all concern is useless—but when everything feels equally alarming, we stop thinking clearly about what actually requires our action. The real insight isn't to dismiss our worries. It's to notice when we're listing problems like a kind of modern anxiety checklist, mixing legitimate concerns with background dread. That difference matters when you're trying to decide what actually needs thinking through versus what just makes you uneasy.