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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

Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
FRANCIS CRICK

Enemy Knowledge One Liner
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
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
The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.
FRANCIS CRICK

Dangerous Death Fight Himself Ideas Thinking
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
FRANCIS CRICK

Biology Design Evolution Mindset Science See
A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.
FRANCIS CRICK

Detail Evidence Ideas Ourselves Science Type
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.
FRANCIS CRICK

Honesty Knowledge Life Man Miracle Satisfaction State
A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
FRANCIS CRICK

Criticism Friendship Goodness Measurement Science Value
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
How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.
FRANCIS CRICK

Division Group Science
If, for example, all the codons are triplets, then in addition to the correct reading of the message, there are two incorrect readings which we shall obtain if we do not start the grouping into sets of three at the right place.
FRANCIS CRICK

Correction Group Place Reading Right Start
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
We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
FRANCIS CRICK

Human Kind Man Reproduction Run
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
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
Evolution is cleverer than you are.
FRANCIS CRICK

Clever Evolution Yourself

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.

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Popular Authors

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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Francis Crick Quotes