In today’s vastly expanded scientific enterprise, obsessed with impact factors and competition, we will need much more night science to unveil the many mysteries that remain about the workings of organisms.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of deep exploration in science beyond superficial metrics of success.
Francois Jacob highlights the growing trend in the scientific community to focus on quantifiable metrics, such as impact factors, which may overshadow the need for thorough and in-depth exploration of complex biological phenomena. He advocates for a more patient and contemplative approach to scientific inquiry, aptly termed 'night science', which encourages researchers to delve into the unknowns of organismal biology rather than getting caught up in competition and superficial achievements.
In practice
Use this quote in a scientific conference to encourage researchers to pursue long-term projects.
The game was that of continually inventing a possible world, or a piece of a possible world, and then of comparing it with the real world... a race without end... What mattered more than the answers were the questions... For me, this world of questions and the provisional, this chase after an answer that was always put off to the next day, all that was euphoric. I lived in the future... I had turned my anxiety into my profession.
The problem with intelligent-design theory, is not that it is false but that it is not falsifiable. Not being susceptible to contradicting evidence, it is not a testable hypothesis. Hence it is not a scientific but a creedal tenet - a matter of faith, unsuited to a public school's science curriculum.
The important thing is that we now have the tools to sequence all kinds of animals and plants and microbes - as well as humans. It is not important that we didn't actually finish the human sequence yet.
Do not imagine that mathematics is hard and crabbed, and repulsive to common sense. It is merely the etherealization of common sense.
God is an ever receding pocket of scientific ignorance.
The universe is almost like a huge magic trick and scientists are trying to figure out how it does what it does.
Almost all the greatest discoveries in astronomy have resulted from what we have elsewhere termed Residual Phenomena, of a qualitative or numerical kind, of such portions of the numerical or quantitative results of observation as remain outstanding and unaccounted for, after subducting and allowing for all that would result from the strict application of known principles.
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