Žemlovka

"What I shall call 'true rationalism' is the rationalism of Socrates. It is the awareness of one's limitations, the intellectual modesty of those who know how often they err, and how much they depend on others even for this knowledge. It is the realisation that we must not expect too much from reason: that argument rarely settles a question, although it is the only means for learning - not to see clearly, but to see more clearly than before. Rationalism is therefore bound up with the idea that the other fellow has a right to be heard, and to defend his arguments. It thus implies the recognition of the claim to tolerance, at least of those who are not intolerance themselves.  One does not kill a man when one adopts the attitude of first listening to his arguments." -Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies

If we look far into the future of our science, what will it mean to say we ‘understand’ the mechanism of behaviour? The obvious answer is what may be called the neurophysiologist’s nirvana: the complete wiring diagram of the nervous system of a species, every synapse labelled as excitatory or inhibitory; presumably, also a graph, for each axon, of nerve impulses as a function of time during the course of each behaviour pattern ... [However] real understanding will only come from distillation of general principles at a higher level, to parallel for example the great principles of genetics — particulate inheritance, continuity of germ-line and non-inheritance of acquired characteristics, dominance, linkage, mutation, and so on. It seems possible that at higher levels some important principles may be anticipated from behavioural evidence alone. The major principles of genetics were all inferred from external evidence long before the internal molecular structure of the gene was even ...