Francis Crick Quotes

62 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
While Occam's razor is a useful tool in the physical sciences, it can be a very dangerous implement in biology. It is thus very rash to use simplicity and elegance as a guide in biological research.

Francis Crick
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
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
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
There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.

Francis Crick
To produce a really good biological theory one must try to see through the clutter produced by evolution to the basic mechanisms lying beneath them, realizing that they are likely to be overlaid by other, secondary mechanisms. What seems to physicists to be a hopelessly complicated process may have been what nature found simplest, because nature could only build on what was already there.

Francis Crick
The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.

Francis Crick
And so to those of you who may be vitalists I would make this prophecy: what everyone believed yesterday, and you believe today, only cranks will believe tomorrow.

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," your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules.

Francis Crick
Attempts have been made from a study of the changes produced by mutation to obtain the relative order of the bases within various triplets, but my own view is that these are premature until there is more extensive and more reliable data on the composition of the triplets.

Francis Crick
Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and Crick.

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
We wish to suggest a structure for the salt of deoxyribose nucleic acid (DNA). This structure has novel features which are of considerable biological interest.

Francis Crick
If revealed religions have revealed anything it is that they are usually wrong.

Francis Crick
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
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