Ed Boyden: belief

Transcript context

…That may just be diminishing returns. There are so many fundamental ideas, and you learn those, and you stop, and then you measure things. Hmm. Well, in biomedicine, systems didn’t evolve to be understood. They evolved to survive and reproduce and all that. One can hope for structure. Biology does give you more structure than we deserve, I think. DNA has a double helix, and you can read out the genetic code. There’s always this question of why is the universe understandable in the first place, and maybe now we’re entering the realm of complexity where things are less understandable. But again, we have to accept reality for what it is. One of my readers suggested I ask you about “the approaches to problem solving, problem decomposition, and backward chaining that he teaches his grad students and postdocs.” Does that make sense to you?…

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