Preview

Thomas's Key Metaphors Of Humans Behaving Like Ants

Satisfactory Essays
Open Document
Open Document
102 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Thomas's Key Metaphors Of Humans Behaving Like Ants
Thomas introduces one of his key metaphors of humans behaving like ants. He suggests that this metaphor is not used because humans do not like to be compared to insects that, as a society, can function as an organism. There are many examples of animals acting as a large organism when in large groups from termites and slime molds to birds and fish. Thomas argues that the communication of results in science puts humans in the same model as these other species. As all scientists communicate and build on each other’s work in order to explore that which we do not

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    Shaun David Hutchinson’s novel We Are the Ants is a riveting story which draws attention to the everyday struggles people may face such as depression, grief, and bullying, acknowledges different perspectives to life and setbacks, and includes a little bit of mystery. Although the novel emphasises the importance of understanding that everyone is going through some sort of dilemma, the struggles facing the characters are exaggerated, which is why I rate this book an 8.5/10. The main character, Henry, is abducted by aliens on a sporadic basis, and is given the chance to save planet Earth from an upcoming catastrophe occurring on January 29, 2016 by pressing a red button on a spaceship. However, Henry is heavily bullied by those at his school,…

    • 395 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The movie Antz is just like the American Government today because it has all tips of politics. In the movie it has many government issues like the colony was led by a president. In the colony there was always someone who would decide “who gets what, when, and how.” The purpose for someone to decide something and having a government is to have order of things. The movie Antz shows that it has a queen and in the queen has the power and control over the whole colony. The Antz have to follow the rules and laws that the queen puts and they have no say in it the colony was an indirect democracy.…

    • 726 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    | The author conveys his idea that humans aren’t as advanced as we think by writing “… that we have not canceled our bond to nature.” He compares humans to animals who are susceptible to diseases harming them without them being able to do anything about it. That’s the way humans are with AIDS, we have to live with it without being able to do anything about it to help the suffering.…

    • 777 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Lewis Thomas Prize winner most certainly took advantage of using his own struggles of understanding science to portray how he isn’t so different from his ordinary readers. “When I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world” (Gawande 2). He creates a link between the audience and himself via building a sense of relation in which people will be more…

    • 655 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    “Scholars as busy ants spoiling the picnic of life, rushing back and forth to pick up the bits and pieces dropped from above.” (Benjamin Hoff pg 24). This quote is quite significant to the work as a whole because it depicts the lives of scholars. Typically scholars are seen as perfectionist and because of their over excessive attempts to make a perfectly balanced life they ruin everything in the process. When one attempts to go back and adjust every bit in their life they will not be capable of enjoying the moments that they have. Thus the picnic is therefore ruined. The metaphor at the beginning of this passage is very realistic since intelligent people are busy like ants always putting their mind in places where their mind doesn’t have to…

    • 133 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Joel is proving Thomas wrong because he is showing that there is a way for humans to coexist with animals in a way that makes every organism dependent on all of the others. This creates an environment where the humans are as dependent on the chickens as the cows are. It is challenging for you to consider this system is truly fair because you think that the animals are exploited. You believe that humans are the masters, but only barely considering we take advantage of the animals around us to help raise ourselves above them. The argument you favor is reasonable but incorrect. While we use efficient bounteous devices like feedlots or selective breeding to take advantage of animals there are methods of farming like Joel’s that do not exploit animals.…

    • 271 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Four Idols

    • 935 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Gould and Bacon may find common ground in science and religion. Bacon says that the Idols of the Care "are the idols of the individual man." Bacon claims "men become attached to certain particular sciences and speculations, either because they fancy themselves the authors and inventors thereof, or because they have bestowed the greatest pains upon them and become most habituated to them." Bacon is saying that men find their root…

    • 935 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Yellow Wallpaper Essay The Yellow Wallpaper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is a diary of a woman in the 19th century suffering from nervous depression. While writing this short story, in reality, Gilman was going through an illness, known as hysteria. This information helped me realize that the quote: “Every kind of creature is developed by the exercise of its functions. If denied the exercise of its functions, it cannot develop in the fullest degree.”…

    • 572 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thomas is a man of science and with his career, it influences his ideology in many aspects. Thomas sometimes doesn’t “know how to control himself”(216) and would entrust in his scientific knowledge above intuition, sense and all. “He is swayed by his heart rather than his head” (219), acts with haste and it is this dedicated trait of his that wounded up hurting him in the tenure of these past few weeks just as you had foresighted. Thomas dedicates his life to his work and with that dedication, I cannot question the credibility behind his claims, but I will express to you how I feel about all of this and my viewpoint as a mother. With that great amount of devotion for his work, it takes away from his consideration for his family. Thomas has just…

    • 1161 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Thomas Aquinas holds that man is created as an autonomous being capable of developing standards from the circumstances and characteristics of the times in which man lives. In other words, the moral world is not fully formed by God; the man has basic moral principles that captures participation in the rational order of creation and freely build his daily live. On the other hand, Hobbes believes that the existence of society, political power, laws, and institutions is artificial; the truly natural, fundamental truth, the starting point of systematic construction, is the individual. Hobbes says that the man calls good and evil to what he subjectively finds pleasant or annoying, respectively. It Advocates, consequently, a radical nominalism, meaning…

    • 937 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Suicide by Emile Durkheim

    • 634 Words
    • 3 Pages

    "Collective tendencies have an existence of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces, though of another sort; they, likewise, affect the individual from without..."…

    • 634 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Order and Chaos

    • 2786 Words
    • 12 Pages

    Science is rational, logical, and orderly. It has the ability to break apart complex systems into simpler ones described by theories ad equations. This is seen in the description of the planets' orbits, evolution, and Newton's laws. Scientists have a thirst for knowledge and seek understanding about the world around them. Their methods are clear and proper ,such as the popular scientific method. Yet even with all their rules and equations they have come to realize the universe is not as predictable and orderly as it seems. The weather, planets, asteroids, organisms, populations, etc. do not always follow the rules that have been assimilated as truths in society . Such an example is the extinction of the dinosaurs, which allowed humans to exist and flourish described by Alvarez. Asteroids can move in unpredictable ways and one did 65 million years ago, and it can happen today. The concept is unimaginable to most ,due to their strong faith in science that is believed to be able to predict or prevent destructive phenomenon in the world. This belief that science is a universal and infallible truth began in the enlightenment and led to modernism. The goal of modernists, synonymous at times with scientists ,is to show that order leads to better functioning and is superior to disorder. To accomplish their goal they must make discoveries that lead to greater knowledge, which they believe leads to greater order, yet they also have to categorize multiple areas and thoughts as disorderly. What is categorized as disorderly becomes an outsider ,and is a deviant…

    • 2786 Words
    • 12 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Bruno Latour’s notion of nonhuman actors and Donna Haraway’s notion of the companion species are both concepts that are based around the view that humans are not alone in the creation and maintenance of society. They are unique concepts as animals are so often excluded from the sociological field. Jim Johnson states ‘the most liberal sociologist often discriminates against nonhumans’ (1988 p.1). Both Haraway and Latour seek to change this. Haraway has a background in science, with a PhD in biology.…

    • 3480 Words
    • 14 Pages
    Powerful Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    Is Advancement Possible?

    • 2345 Words
    • 10 Pages

    Progress and growth has always been the underlying cause for our existence. We define progress, in terms of material growth, by the option of affording better or more cars, or to a luxurious lifestyle. We appreciate technological advancement in the field of science that we once thought was impossible to explain let alone exist. Advancement holds a very important place in history and science. However, understanding advancement is difficult because for different people and situations the meaning of progress would be relative and conditional, and thus change. For instance, an NGO worker who is fighting towards the cause of education for underprivileged would believe that spending million dollars on a scientific experiment is worthless in comparison to, spending it on the education of less privileged children in a third world country. However, for the scientist, who invests into a scientific experiment believes that he is advancing science. His choices that determine what progress means to him are relatively different from an NGO worker. This leads us to the question, how does one know whether human beings are actually capable of advancement? Aung San Suu Kyi, a Burmese politician fighting for democracy in her country, claims in her speech “Freedom from Fear”, that whole of humanity is constantly progressing towards an ultimate spiritual and material truth. Her ideas communicate a basic principle that human beings value advancement because they are different from animals, and consequently capable of rational choices. Plato’s Allegory of the Cave also sheds light upon this difference, while helping in understanding advancement. However, Thomas Hobbes argues from a different perspective, and provides an approach that seeks to question whether there really is any distinction between humans and animals that enables us to be rational and make human choices. In my essay, I choose to agree with Aung Saan Suu Kyi’s view…

    • 2345 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Powerful Essays