I remember this part of his autobiography. It was his response to a non-scientist asserting that scientists have an inferior sense of beauty. Funny, for a person limited in their understanding of the world (by not understanding science and presumably also, math) to insist their own sense of beauty is superior, is a bit silly.
Being able to appreciate beauty on multiple levels is one of the best things about life, period.
It is however kind of intrinsic to learning biology. Frankly if you’re not good at brute memorization you’re not likely to do all that great in many/most biology classes. Particularly at the undergrad level, but really the knock-on effects carry on afterwards. There is a very large amount of information you need to have at your fingertips before you can then proceed to synthesize and analyze.
Right.
It does a surgeon little good if he knows where to look up how the architecture of a spleen looks like, but doesn’t have that information in his organic data bank.
ETA: I was a double major in biology and history in college, which a number of people I have met have found an odd pairing. But aside from just being the two big areas of my personal interests, having a good memory helped me in both 
.
To program in Fortran using a card punch machine.
Long after either was very useful.
Seemed to be a weird sort of hazing by the university.
If so, it was unintentional. My FORTRAN programming on cards was processed on a CDC 3300, with magnetic core memory. I don’t think it supported any other means of I/O.
I almost became a doctor, mostly because I could memorize large chunks of facts. So I aced all my HS/college biology and other science classes.
The minute I decided not to go to med school, my brain jettisoned most of the stuff I’d memorized. Though enough stayed in that I can follow my medical friends’ conversations.
I studied Russian when I was in high school, but at UCLA. I took another year once I got to actually be a UCLA student, and the teacher said in Russia, most people just mumble their diclensions in conversational speech. I felt duped! Well, not really.
Once standing in line to get into The Troubadour this guy ahead of us was planning a trip to Moscow and wanted me to teach him how to say “beautiful woman” in Russian.
The things that one remembers…
Memorization of long Shakespearean monologs.
Yeah. I had to memorize Marc Antony’s eulogy from Julius Caesar and recite it. Muffed one word and got a C.
It’s “lend me your ears”
“I come to bury Caesar, not to raise him”
Nitpick - the passage where Jesus had white hair is Revelation (Ch 1 v14), not the Gospels.
Of course, Jesus was Indian.
Isn’ that “…not to braise him”
The Dewey Decimal System for locating a book in a library. I didn’t use it then or later. It was just for the librarians themselves to place the books on the shelves, it helped no one else. The science books are over here, look around, the history books are here, fiction in that area, etc.
I mean, some kind or sorting method would be useful for librarians but that doesn’t translate into usefulness for others.
Imagine that librarians sorted books by weight. Simple to implement, 1) weigh the book, 2) put in appropriate spot. By comparison, Dewey Decimal is very useful.
Huh? Without it (or some other similar system, like Library of Congress), how would you find the books you were interested in?
Over the course of my undergraduate studies, I did research in more than one library. In each facility, I knew exactly where I needed to go to find the books I was looking for at the time.
Did the system make perfect sense? Heavens, no. But grouping them by classes certainly made more sense than by author or title.
“Who, you all know, are horrible men.”
“Who, you all know, are cannibal men.”
“Who, you all know, are gonorrhoeal men.”
Clearly I am not bringing much to the table here…
Ah, indeed, I had it mixed up with Mark 9, but that just talks about his clothes, not Jesus himself.
Well, I didn’t recognise the quote so I looked it up.