Evolution is cleverer than you are.
Interpretation
Evolution outsmarts human understanding and intellect.
This quote by Francis Crick suggests that the process of evolution is more complex and insightful than human intellect can fully comprehend. It highlights the remarkable adaptations and innovations that have arisen through natural selection, emphasizing that despite our intelligence, we are often blind to the sophisticated mechanisms of biological change over time.
In practice
In a scientific conference discussing biology, one might say, 'As Francis Crick suggests, evolution is cleverer than you are.'
One can say, looking at the papers in this symposium, that the elucidation of the genetic code is indeed a great achievement. It is, in a sense, the key to molecular biology because it shows how the great polymer languages, the nucleic acid language and the protein language, are linked together.
Exact knowledge is the enemy of vitalism.
A theory should not attempt to explain all the facts, because some of the facts are wrong
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.
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.
It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material.
If others would but reflect on mathematical truths as deeply and as continuously as I have, they would make my discoveries.
It is not a simple matter to differentiate unsuccessful from successful experiments. . . .[Most] work that is finally successful is the result of a series of unsuccessful tests in which difficulties are gradually eliminated.
Sooner or later, we will face a catastrophic threat from space. Of all the possible threats, only a gigantic asteroid hit can destroy the entire planet. If we prepare now, we better our odds of survival. The dinosaurs never knew what hit them.
Quality without science and research is absurd. You can't make inferences that something works when you have 60 percent missing data.
There are so many intricacies to our brain that won't be understood unless we start to look at the system as a whole. All these different details don't operate in isolation.
New, distant Scenes of endless Science rise: So pleas'd at first, the towring Alps we try.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.