John’s Reviews > Brave Genius: A Scientist, a Philosopher, and Their Daring Adventures from the French Resistance to the Nobel Prize > Status Update

Monod on contraception, continued: “Those who oppose you and ignore the hard reality, the tragedies, the mutilations and deaths, carry a heavy responsibility. No one should have the right to sacrifice the happiness, the health, or the life of another human being to their own personal principles, however sincere and noble they may be”

One thing that’s bugged me about biology for years is the lack of direct observation of processes. I always thought the textbooks were missing proof, or maybe it’s just I was getting a second rate education at community college. But now I see from Monod’s story how science is often just conjecture that is validated (not proved) by experiment.

“the process of science does not consist in explaining the unknown by the known…it aims on the contrary to give an account of what is observed by the properties of what is imagined. To explain the visible by the invisible. And it is…through an appeal to new hidden structures, with hypothetical properties, that science proceeds.”

Christianity “postpones to a point beyond the span of history the cure of evil and murder,” he noted, while Russian Communism justified terror and murder and crushed freedom in the promise of some far-off workers’ utopia. For Camus, “real generosity to the future lies in giving all to the present.”

What Camus could not abide were ideologies that sacrificed life in the present, the one fundamental value above all, for some promise of future justice.

The first philosophical secret of life for Camus was the recognition of the absurd condition. This instinct for positive rebellion—against death, oppression, suffering, or injustice—was the second secret of life, and a path to humanity.

Among the many contributors to the rise of terror, Camus suggested that one overriding factor was the emphasis on doctrine and bureaucracy over human dignity.