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“... of learning anything from anybody’; and everyone else who doubts the hope of progress, such as Francis Galton, for the ‘air of almost exultant scorn in his description of the uselessness of a man’s trying to better himself beyond the degree of his innate capacities’; there are other kinds of psychologists too – psychoanalysts, with their system ...”

“... between the selfish gene hypothesis of Richard Dawkins and the selfish DNA hypothesis of Francis Crick, he is led into an enlightening discussion of biological reductionism. The Darwinism of Dawkins is thoroughly reductionist, in the sense that bodies are merely temporary containers for their selfish genes: the genes themselves increase in ...”

“... from one generation to the next. This was the problem which utterly absorbed James Watson and Francis Crick as they struggled at the beginning of the Fifties, in Perutz’s group at the Cavendish, to unravel the structure of DNA. They spent a lot of time lounging around and arguing – indulging in imaginative guesswork, one might say, instead of ...”

“... indifference of the will’. One can begin to wonder just how Poirier’s Emerson differs from Francis Crick, who genially insinuates that the will is merely another nerve cell. Crick’s ‘astonishing hypothesis’ would meet Poirier’s version of the pragmatic test, but I do not think that Emerson (or Wallace ...”

“... Sousa once wrote to me: I don’t know if Gerald Edelman ever gets depressed, or if Jim Watson or Francis Crick ever get depressed. But for the more ordinary of us, the strength that is needed to believe that what you believe in is worth pursuing is very great. And at the end of a Glasgow wet, windy week, it cries out. You have no idea how meaningful it ...”

“... is the secret of life? Ferry keeps to the conventional meaning of the phrase, encouraged by Francis Crick’s announcement in the Eagle pub in Cambridge in 1953, and since then widely adopted among popular science writers. To learn the secret of life is not to discover how organisms become adapted to their surroundings, how blood is circulated, or ...”

“... schizophrenic ex-CIA dolphin. The ravings of a new-wave physicist, someone who had worked with Francis Crick. And done too much mescaline. A classic William Burroughs paranoid believing herself to be the only person ‘in possession of all the facts’. Ms Keeldare’s text was paralysed with self-consciousness, mesmerised by its own audacity. Out of ...”

“... less perceptive than Fred Steward’s essay on ‘Political Formation’ in Brenda Swann and Francis Aprahamian’s collection J.D. Bernal: A Life in Science and Politics (1999), presumably because he is too anxious to balance his enormous admiration for the man and the scientist by insisting on his rejection of the Stalinist. I am not in a position to ...”

“... The late Bernard Crick, who had a fine and memorable funeral in Edinburgh the other day, left a legacy of sharp opinions behind him. Among the least popular was his opinion of the British tradition of biography, and his remarks remain a stinging nettle in the path of all ‘life-writers’. In the introduction to his life of George Orwell, Crick said that most biographies were just dressed-up historical novels ...”

“... is not a modern revelation: indeed, it is probably universal. One of the chief impediments that Francis Bacon saw to the Advancement of Learning and hence of mankind itself was the too ready dislocation of words from meanings, the ‘Pygmalion’s frenzy’ in which people were ever liable to be moved by words themselves without thought to what ‘weight of ...”

“... should also be known and accessible to us.’ The politics of scrutiny will not suffer the crick that can’t be cracked. Total knowability is the objective, and, its high priests say, we have the technology to achieve it. This is not a conspiracy (and if it were, it would involve Facebook and Google, as much as, if not more than, the ...”