My own prejudices are exactly the opposite of the functionalists’: “If you want to understand function, study structure”.
FRANCIS CRICKIf 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.
More Francis Crick Quotes
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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.
FRANCIS CRICK -
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 -
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 -
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 -
You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
FRANCIS CRICK -
The dangerous man is the one who has only one idea, because then he’ll fight and die for it.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A busy life is a wasted life.
FRANCIS CRICK -
You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.
FRANCIS CRICK -
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 -
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
FRANCIS CRICK -
Evolution is cleverer than you are.
FRANCIS CRICK -
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 -
Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
FRANCIS CRICK -
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.
FRANCIS CRICK -
A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
FRANCIS CRICK