Francis Crick - Fact Quotes

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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.

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
If for example I had some idea, which as it turned out would be quite wrong, was going off of the tangent, Watson would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice-versa. If he would have some idea I didn't like, and I would say so, this would shake his thinking about, and draw him back again. And in fact it is one of the requirements for collaborations of this sort, is you must be perfectly candid, one might almost say rude, to the person you're working with. It's useless working with somebody who is either much too junior than yourself or much too senior because then politeness creeps in. And this is the end of all real collaboration in science (giggles).

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

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
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