We need new metaphors that put life at the centre of biology Essays
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aeon.co
The Medusa and the Snail: More Notes of a Biology Watcher is a 1979 collection of essays by the American science writer Lewis Thomas. It was published by Viking Press in 1979 and reissued by Penguin Books in 1995. Most of the essays in the book had first appeared in the New England Journal of Medicine. It is Thomas's second collection of short essays after Lives of a Cell.[1]
The title essay is about the relationship between Nudibranch sea slug and the medusa of a jellyfish that inhabit the Bay of Naples. It explores how the relationship between the two creatures can be seen as illustrating the impossibility of understanding the notion of the self.[2]