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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

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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
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Belief
Appear
Vestiges
Time
Religion
Foolish
Erroneous
Life
Universe
Entire
Removing
True
Atheism
Plausible
Place
However
Earlier
Ideas
View
Unfortunate
Find
Views
Base
Important
Quite
Beliefs

More quotes by Francis Crick

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A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
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Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved.
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Christianity may be OK between consenting adults in private but should not be taught to young children.
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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.
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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.
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There is no form of prose more difficult to understand and more tedious to read than the average scientific paper.
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Do codons overlap? In other words, as we read along the genetic message do we find a base which is a member of two or more codons? It now seems fairly certain that codons do not overlap.
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We have to take away from humans in the long run their reproductive autonomy as the only way to guarantee the advancement of mankind.
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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.
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I think she [Rosalind Franklin] was a good experimentalist but certainly not of the first rank. She was simply not in the same class as Eigen or Bragg or Pauling, nor was she as good as Dorothy Hodgkin. She did not even select DNA to study. It was given to her. Her theoretical crystallography was very average.
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Since I essentially knew nothing, I had an almost completely free choice.
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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.
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It is not easy to convey, unless one has experienced it, the dramatic feeling of sudden enlightenment that floods the mind when the right idea finally clinches into place.
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Evolution is cleverer than you are.
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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.
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God is a hacker, not an engineer
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Rather than believe that Watson and Crick made the DNA structure, I would rather stress that the structure made Watson and 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.
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A man who is right every time is not likely to do very much.
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A busy life is a wasted life.
Francis Crick