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In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

Francis Crick

A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK

Explanation Fact Theory Wrong
The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar.
FRANCIS CRICK

Evidence Freedom Science System
It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.
FRANCIS CRICK

Drama Easy Enlightenment Experience Feeling Place
A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
FRANCIS CRICK

Accomplishment Man Right Time
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
FRANCIS CRICK

Biology Chemistry Explanation Fact Modern Movement
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
FRANCIS CRICK

Average Difficult Paper Reading Science Understand
It would appear that the number of nonsense triplets is rather low, since we only occasionally come across them. However this conclusion is less secure than our other deductions about the general nature of the genetic code.
FRANCIS CRICK

Appearance Nature Ourselves Security
Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
FRANCIS CRICK

Believe Myself Structure
Exploratory research is really like working in a fog. You don’t know where you’re going. You’re just groping. Then people learn about it afterwards and think how straightforward it was.
FRANCIS CRICK

Education Learning People Research Work
When you start in science, you are brainwashed into believing how careful you must be, and how difficult it is to discover things. There’s something that might be called the ‘graduate student syndrome’; graduate students hardly believe they can make a discovery.
FRANCIS CRICK

Believe Difficult Discover Hard Science Start Yourself
A comparison between the triplets tentatively deduced by these methods with the changes in amino acid sequence produced by mutation shows a fair measure of agreement.
FRANCIS CRICK

Agreement Comparison Measurement Production
Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don’t be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.
FRANCIS CRICK

Argument Experiment Impression Negative Possible
My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.
FRANCIS CRICK

Function Prejudice Science Study Understand Yourself
If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it.
FRANCIS CRICK

Bad Evidence Foundation Goodness Legal Logic
It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
FRANCIS CRICK

Difficult Live World
It seems likely that most if not all the genetic information in any organism is carried by nucleic acid – usually by DNA, although certain small viruses use RNA as their genetic material.
FRANCIS CRICK

Biology Information Material Myself Science

In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

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In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.

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