Science is wonderfully equipped to answer the question 'How?' but it gets terribly confused when you ask the question 'Why?'
Interpretation
Science can explain the mechanisms behind phenomena, but it struggles to address the underlying reasons or purposes.
In this quote, Erwin Chargaff highlights the distinction between the capabilities of science and the philosophical inquiries about existence and purpose. While science excels in providing empirical answers to questions of 'how' things happen—such as the processes and mechanisms inherent in nature—it often falls short when confronted with the deeper inquiries of 'why' things occur, which pertain to meaning and interpretation beyond mere observation. This reflects the limitations of scientific inquiry, suggesting that not all questions can be answered through empirical evidence alone.
In practice
In a philosophy lecture discussing the limits of scientific inquiry.
Science is now the craft of the manipulation, substitution and deflection of the forces of nature. What I see coming is a gigantic slaughterhouse, an Auschwitz, in which valuable enzymes, hormones, and so on will be extracted instead of gold teeth.
One of the most insidious and nefarious properties of scientific models is their tendency to take over, and sometimes supplant, reality.
You can stop splitting the atom; you can stop visiting the moon; you can stop using aerosols; you may even decide not to kill entire populations by the use of a few bombs. But you cannot recall a new form of life.
Do I get grief for the fact that in communicating, say, about the baboons I'm doing so much anthropomorphizing? One hopes that the parts that are blatantly ridiculous will be perceived as such. I've nonetheless been stunned by some of my more humorless colleagues - to see that they were not capable of recognizing that.
Theory-free science makes about as much sense as value-free politics.
It is an error to imagine that evolution signifies a constant tendency to increased perfection. That process undoubtedly involves a constant remodeling of the organism in adaptation to new conditions; but it depends on the nature of those conditions whether the direction of the modifications effected shall be upward or downward.
So we find that the three possible solutions of the great problem of increasing human energy are answered by the three words: food, peace, work... Their scientific meaning and purpose now clear to me: food to increase the mass, peace to diminish the retarding force, and work to increase the force accelerating human movement.
If we look at the way the universe behaves, quantum mechanics gives us fundamental, unavoidable indeterminacy, so that alternative histories of the universe can be assigned probability.
An alleged scientific discovery has no merit unless it can be explained to a barmaid.
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