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Evolution is cleverer than you are.

Francis Crick

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Francis Crick
Age: 88 †
Born: 1916
Born: June 8
Died: 2004
Died: July 28
Biochemist
Biologist
Geneticist
Molecular Biologist
Neuroscientist
Physicist
Scientist
University Teacher
Francis Harry Compton Crick
Francis H.C. Crick
Cleverer
Evolution
Science

More quotes by Francis Crick

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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
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How is the base sequence, divided into codons? There is nothing in the backbone of the nucleic acid, which is perfectly regular, to show us how to group the bases into codons.
Francis Crick
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It is notoriously difficult to define the word living.
Francis Crick
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Again the message to experimentalists is: Be sensible but don't be impressed too much by negative arguments. If at all possible, try it and see what turns up. Theorists almost always dislike this sort of approach.
Francis Crick
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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
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Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
Francis Crick
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God is a hacker, not an engineer
Francis Crick
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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
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You can do reverse engineering, but you can’t do reverse hacking.
Francis Crick
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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
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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
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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
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Jim and I hit it off immediately, partly because our interests were astonishingly similar and partly, I suspect, because a certain youthful arrogance, a ruthlessness, an impatience with sloppy thinking can naturally to both of us.
Francis Crick
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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
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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
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Anybody who believes that the earth is less than 10,000 years old needs psychiatric help.
Francis Crick
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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
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There is no scientific study more vital to man than the study of his own brain. Our entire view of the universe depends on it.
Francis Crick
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This seems highly likely, especially as it has been shown that in several systems mutations affecting the same amino acid are extremely near together on the genetic map.
Francis Crick
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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