Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
FRANCIS CRICKYou’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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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.
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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.
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You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
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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.
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There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
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It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
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In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy and especially dislike reading experimental papers. He seemed to have very strong biological intuitions but unfortunately of negative sign.
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If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
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We are sometimes asked what the result would be if we put four +’s in one gene. To answer this my colleagues have recently put together not merely four but six +’s.
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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.
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Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
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One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.
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A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
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Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.
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There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
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It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
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The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
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We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
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I also suspect that many workers in this field [molecular biology] and related fields have been strongly motivated by the desire, rarely actually expressed, to refute vitalism.
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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