This is because once, long ago, cranes built a special crane. Man is a crane with ideas. Now, as the zoologist Richard Dawkins argues, the information about how to build a crane need no longer be passed on through the genes, it can be passed on through ideas themselves, or, as Dawkins calls them, memes . By creating memes, the living world has created a newer, faster way of creating cranes. Culture, civilisation, universities and science itself are all products of it, and they are all themselves cranes.
Education is a crane.
But it is more than that, it is the greatest crane of all. Your degree is a crane. It is very simple, but it is what I wanted to say to those students all those years ago. That is what I say to you today. You, as science and education graduates, are one with them.