Francis Crick Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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
A final proof of our ideas can only be obtained by detailed studies on the alterations produced in the amino acid sequence of a protein by mutations of the type discussed here.

Francis Crick
If 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.

Francis Crick
Moreover the incorporation requires the same components needed for protein synthesis, and is inhibited by the same inhibitors. Thus the system is most unlikely to be a complete artefact and is very probably closely related to genuine protein synthesis.

Francis Crick
Theorists will often complain that experimentalists ignore their work. Let a theorist produce just one theory of the type sketched above (i.e., one that makes nonobvious verified predictions) and the world will jump to the conclusion (not always true) that he has a special insight into difficult problems.

Francis Crick
Intelligent thinking means an increment of freedom in action - an emancipation from chance and fatality. "Thought" represents the suggestion of a way of response that is different from that which would have been followed if intelligent observation had not effected an inference as to the future.

Francis Crick
Nowadays most people know what DNA is, or if they don't know it must be a dirty word, like "chemical" or "synthetic."

Francis Crick
Scientific thinking, which is analytic and objective, goes against the grain of traditional human thinking, which is associative and subjective.

Francis Crick
Once we have become adjusted to the idea that we are here because we have evolved from simple chemical compounds by a process of natural selection, it is remarkable how many of the problems of the modern world take on a completely new light.

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
No good model ever accounted for all the facts, since some data was bound to be misleading if not plain wrong. A theory that did fit all the data would have been "carpentered" to do this and would thus be open to suspicion.

Francis Crick
Every time I write a paper on the origin of life, I determine I will never write another one, because there is too much speculation running after too few facts.

Francis Crick
Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.

Francis Crick
What could be more foolish than to base one's entire view of life on ideas that, however plausible at the time, now appear to be quite erroneous? And what would be more important than to find our true place in the universe by removing one by one these unfortunate vestiges of earlier beliefs?

Francis Crick
The development of biology is going to destroy to some extent our traditional grounds for ethical belief, and it is not easy to see what to put in their place.

Francis Crick
An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going.

Francis Crick
Some scientists work so hard there is no time left for serious thinking.

Francis Crick
I have no doubt, as will emerge later, that this loss of faith in Christian religion and my growing attachment to science plays a dominant part in my scientific career, not so much on a day-to-day basis but in the choice of what I have considered interesting and important.

Francis Crick
A single neuron may be rather dumb, but it is dumb in many subtle ways.

Francis Crick
It is all too easy to make some plausible simplifying assumptions, do some elaborate mathematics that appear to give a rough fit with at least some experimental data, and think one has achieved something. The chance of such an approach doing anything useful, apart from soothing the theorist's ego, is rather small..

Francis Crick
One of the striking characteristics of modern science is that it often moves so fast that a research worker can see rather clearly whether his earlier ideas, or those of his contemporaries, were correct or incorrect.

Francis Crick
When times get tough, true novelty is needed — novelty whose important features cannot be preplanned — and for this we must rely on chance. Chance is the only source of true novelty.

Francis Crick
The basic trouble is that nature is so complex that many quite different theories can go some way to explaining the results.... What constraints can be used as a guide through the jungle of possible theories? It seems to me that the only useful constraints are contained in the experimental evidence.

Francis Crick
It is virtually impossible for a theorist, by thought alone, to arrive at the correct solution to a set of biological problems.... The best a theorist can hope to do is to point an experimentalist in the right direction..

Francis Crick
Free will is located in or near the anterior cingulate sulcus.

Francis Crick
The average adult can usually enjoy something only if it relates to what he knows already, and what he knows about science is in many cases pitifully inadequate.

Francis Crick
The first distinguishing characteristic of thinking is facing the facts - inquiry, minute and extensive scrutinizing, observation.

Francis Crick
A theory will always command more attention if it is supported by unexpected evidence, particularly evidence of a different kind.

Francis Crick
In research the front line is almost always in a fog.

Francis Crick
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