Francis Crick Quotes

There are no monotone "values" in biology.

It's so hard to figure out what's going on in biological systems. You just can't see them.

If I have learned anything as a scientist, it is that one should not make things complicated when a simple explanation will do.

Consciousness, for me, is a manifestation of complexity in biology. It's an emergent property.

I think simplicity is a good guide: The more economical a theory, the better.

My interest in biology was pretty much always on the philosophical side.

To describe an animal as a physico-chemical system of extreme complexityis no doubt perfectly correct, except that it misses out on the animalness of the animal.

The physicist's problem is the problem of ultimate origins and ultimate natural laws. The biologist's problem is the problem of complexity.

I believe the evidence strongly supports common descent. But the root question remains unanswered: What has caused complex systems to form?

My fascination is broadly with biology and the fact that our increased understanding of biology allows for breakthroughs in a broad set of diseases.

The system of life on this planet is so astoundingly complex that it was a long time before man even realized that it was a system at all and that it wasn't something that was just there.

Simplicity of all things is the hardest to be copy.

That the fundamental aspects of heredity should have turned out to be so extraordinarily simple supports us in the hope that nature may, after all, be entirely approachable. Her much-advertised inscrutability has once more been found to be an illusion due to our ignorance. This is encouraging, for, if the world in which we live were as complicated as some of our friends would have us believe we might well despair that biology could ever become an exact science.

In complexity, it is only simplicity that can be interesting.

Scheherezade is easy; a little black dress is difficult.

Humor is a terrific tool for explaining things, especially when what you're explaining is frightening or dull and complicated.

Computer science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, biology is about microscopes or chemistry is about beakers and test tubes. Science is not about tools. It is about how we use them, and what we find out when we do.

Beauty is the ultimate defense against complexity.

In normal life, 'simplicity' is synonymous with 'easy to do,' but when a chef uses the word, it means 'takes a lifetime to learn.'

Like all magnificent things, it's very simple.

A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises is, the more different kinds of things it relates, and the more extended its area of applicability.

...it is simplicity that is difficult to make.

Great men, like nature, use simple language.

The beauty of a living thing is not the atoms that go into it, but the way those atoms are put together. Information distilled over 4 billion years of biological evolution. Incidentally, all the organisms on the Earth are made essentially of that stuff. An eyedropper full of that liquid could be used to make a caterpillar or a petunia if only we knew how to put the components together.

Making something simple is very difficult.