Page 138 - The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1

Nicolai Levashov. The Mirror of My Soul. Vol. 1. Born in the USSR

— You’d better do what you were taught to do!
Certainly I could ignore such an obviously aggressive and tactless comment. But I

decided to cross my “t’s”. It was fully possible that there was something I did not know,
I never considered and still do not, that I know everything about everything and I am
never ashamed of learning something new. Therefore I asked him a question:

— Excuse me, and who are you?
He appeared to be a Doctor of Science in biology. Having found that out, I asked
him to ex-plain the nature of the human embryo’s development. And he began to explain
that different hormones and enzymes appear in different zygote cells (cells of a fertilized
egg) and, as a result, a brain is developed from one zygote cell, a heart is developed from
another cell, etc. I said that I know this from my eighth school year, when I studied

“Human anatomy and physiology.” Then I asked him whether he was familiar with
histology (microscopic study of cell tissue) and whether he agreed with the concepts of
this science? He answered positively. Then I said:

— After conception there is one fertilized egg which begins to divide. After one
cell divides, two absolutely identical cells appear. When they in their turn divide, four
identical cells appear, and so on: eight, sixteen, thirty-two, sixty-four, etc. In other
words, all cells of the embryo have identical genetics and are copies of one fertilized
egg.

After I described the process, I asked him the question:
— Will you explain to me, please, how is it possible that different hormones and
enzymes appear in absolutely identical cells of the embryo?

He, being a little bit embarrassed, answered:
— Only God knows!

To tell the truth, I did not expect any other answer and said to him:
— I am not a God but I know this!
Certainly, I could have ignored the Doctor of Science’s caustic remark, but then the
rest of people present at the talk would have got the impression that I spoke about
subjects of which I understood nothing. The most frightening thing was that everyone
was completely sure of the fact that modern biology and medicine indeed understood the
nature of living matter; that did not correspond to the real state of affairs.

It turns out to be very interesting: the knowledge of your opponent’s “language”
allows not only discussing one or another question on equal terms, but also completely
defeating your opponent on all points of the dispute. Certainly, it is impossible to know
everything, but it is quite essential to know the main theses and concepts of modern

science, if you have no desire to “drown” in the bog of “scientific” terms, which hide
nothing else but plain ignorance.

An educated person is not a person who holds in his memory everything that he (or
she) has read or everything that humanity accumulated, which is impossible in principle,
but a person who knows the basis and knows where to find the necessary nuances. My
interest in biology, physics, astronomy, chemistry, geography, history and philosophy,
and the aspiration to “get to the bottom of things” was neither in vain nor “wasted”. My
understanding of what stands behind scientific terms and my orientation in the
“Minotaur labyrinths” of science became my Ariadne’s guiding thread.

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