It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.
Interpretation
Understanding our brains helps us comprehend our existence in the universe.
Francis Crick emphasizes the importance of studying our brains to better understand our role and significance in the vast and intricate universe. He suggests that by exploring the complexities of our minds, we can gain insight into our place within the greater cosmos and the nature of our existence.
In practice
In a lecture about neuroscience and its impact on our understanding of the universe, this quote can emphasize the interconnectedness of mind and cosmos.
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
In the fullness of time, educated people will believe there is no soul independent of the body, and hence no life after death.
The true laboratory is the mind, where behind illusions we uncover the laws of truth.
Science is among the most profoundly human of our activities. Far from being subsumed by the dehumanising effects of technology, science, in fact, remains our last stand against it.
The outcome of any serious research can only be to make two questions grow where only one grew before.
[Marijuana] doesn't have a high potential for abuse, and there are very legitimate medical applications. In fact, sometimes marijuana is the only thing that works... [I]t is irresponsible not to provide the best care we can as a medical community, care that could involve marijuana. We have been terribly and systematically misled for nearly 70 years in the United States, and I apologize for my own role in that.
1. When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. 2. The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible. 3. Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.
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