The Lives of a Cell by Lewis Thomas

           Lewis Tomas, the author of this essay, is a physician and a novelist. He has attended Princeton and Harvard and has received the National Book award three times for his work. He is mostly known for his essays that he wrote in The New England Journal of Medicine. 

           In this essay Thomas contemplates the idea of man being separate from nature. He goes on to talk about different parts of the body and nature, and how everything works together in a sense. Come the beginning of the book Thomas writes, “Man is embedded in nature” (Thomas 358). Then he goes on to support this claim. And this statement was the purpose of his essay. He wanted to explain how even though we feel as though we are separated from nature, we are closer and more connected than we think. The author explains this purpose well throughout his essay. Come the end of the essay you have a firm understanding of the point that Thomas was trying to make, mostly because of he rhetoric he uses.

            The most present of these rhetorical strategies is logos. Through out the essay Thomas uses a lot of facts and creates logical arguments. When talking about the mitochondria he states, “Thy turn out to be little separate creatures, the colonial posterity of migrant prokaryotes, probably primitive bacteria that swam into ancestral precursors” (Thomas 359). This quote exemplifies the amount of facts that the author knows and shows he is an expert. This creates a logical argument to support his purpose and it also adds to his credibility (ethos).

            It is because of these rhetorical strategies that Thomas is able to get his point across to scientist, who I believe to be the audience that he wrote this essay for.

(A picture of the food web to further illustrate Thomas's purpose of showing how all nature is connected. Credit: http://biology.tutorvista.com)