It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
FRANCIS CRICKExact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong.
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My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.
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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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Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
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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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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.
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Avoid the temptation to work so hard that there is no time left for serious thinking.
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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
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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.
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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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Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.
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A good scientist values criticism almost higher than friendship: no, in science criticism is the height and measure of friendship.
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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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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
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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