“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.”

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.

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.

You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.

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.

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.

Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.

Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

A knowledge of the true age of the Earth and of the fossil record makes it impossible for any balanced intellect to believe in the literal truth of every part of the Bible in the way that fundamentalists do.

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.

A busy life is a wasted life.

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.

Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.

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.

Chance is the only source of true novelty.

It is essential to understand our brains in some detail if we are to assess correctly our place in this vast and complicated universe we see all around us.

Your biography becomes your biology. This biography includes the totality of your choices, the things you feed your body – you thoughts, your actions, your food – the thing you feed your life.

Being of service is not an option, it is a biological necessity. Every kind of action we do for someone is a reanimation of our own life force – and of the other person’s.

Common stock investors can make money by predicting the outcomes of practice evolution. You can’t derive this by fundamental analysis – you must think biologically.

My mother is a realist, and she’s had biological and adoptive children, and she said it’s no different: No matter what, they’re putting a stranger into your arms. You don’t know them yet.

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.

Botany is based on fixed genera.

The muscles used to make a smile actually send a biochemical message to our nervous system that it is safe to relax the flight of freeze response.

It now seems very likely that many of the 64 triplets, possibly most of them, may code one amino acid or another, and that in general several distinct triplets may code one amino acid.