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The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

Francis Crick

It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
FRANCIS CRICK

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

Explanation Fact Theory Wrong
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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Biology Experience Experiment Intellectual Mathematics Negative Reading Strong
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
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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Brain Complication Detail Essential Place See Understand Universe
Almost all aspects of life are engineered at the molecular level, and without understanding molecules we can only have a very sketchy understanding of life itself.
FRANCIS CRICK

Life Science Understand
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
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
You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
FRANCIS CRICK

Existence Science Yourself
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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Age Balance Earth Fundamental Impossible Intellectual Knowledge Record True
It is one of the more striking generalizations of biochemistry – which surprisingly is hardly ever mentioned in the biochemical textbooks – that the twenty amino acids and the four bases, are, with minor reservations, the same throughout Nature.
FRANCIS CRICK

Generation Hard Nature Strike
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
Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
FRANCIS CRICK

Freedom Myself
Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.
FRANCIS CRICK

Freedom Location
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.
FRANCIS CRICK

Religion Reveal Wrong

The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

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The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.

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