The Value of Being Wrong: Lewis Thomas on Generative Mistakes

In praise of our “property of error, spontaneous, uncontrolled, and rich in possibilities.”

We know that life is the self-correcting mechanism for error — as much in its evolutionary history as in its existential reality. And yet we are living our lives under the tyranny of perfection, as if all the right answers await us at the end of some vector we must follow infallibly until we arrive at the ultimate ideal. But the truth is that we simply don’t know — we don’t know where life ultimately lea...