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Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Francis Crick

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
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
Trying to determine the structure of a protein by UV spectroscopy was like trying to determine the structure of a piano by listening to the sound it made while being dropped down a flight of stairs.
FRANCIS CRICK

Determination Listen Sound Structure Try
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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Expression Motivational Myself Strong Work
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 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.
FRANCIS CRICK

Appearance Nature Ourselves Security
You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
FRANCIS CRICK

Professional Technology Yourself
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.
FRANCIS CRICK

Biology Chemistry Explanation Fact Modern Movement
A busy life is a wasted life.
FRANCIS CRICK

Busy Life One Liner Wasted Time
Evolution is cleverer than you are.
FRANCIS CRICK

Clever Evolution Yourself
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
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
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
In my experience most mathematicians are intellectually lazy.
FRANCIS CRICK

Experience Intellectual Mathematics
For simplicity one can think of the + class as having one extra base at some point or other in the genetic message and the – class as having one too few.
FRANCIS CRICK

Oneself Simplicity Thinking
Protein synthesis is a central problem for the whole of biology, and that it is in all probability closely related to gene action.
FRANCIS CRICK

Action Biology Problem

Evolution is cleverer than you are.

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Evolution is cleverer than you are.

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