British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; co-discoverer of the structure of DNA
Francis Harry Compton Crick (8 June 1916 – 28 July 2004) was a British physicist, molecular biologist and neuroscientist, most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953.
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Native Name:
Francis Harry Compton Crick
Alternative Names:
Francis H.C. Crick
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Our brains have evolved mainly to deal with our body and its interactions with the world it senses to be around us. Is this world real? This is a venerable philosophical issue and I do not wish to be embroiled in the finely honed squabbles to which it has led. I merely state my own working hypothesis: that there is indeed an outside world, and that it is largely independent of our observing it. We can never fully know this outside world, but we can obtain approximate information about some aspects of its properties by using our senses and our brain.
Susan Blackmore: Filozofların rolünden bahsettin, sence filozofların bundaki yeri ne veya bu noktada bugüne kadar nasıl bir rol oynadılar?
Francis Crick: Filozoflarla alakalı bir sürü espri yapılır, burada onları yapmayacağım. İşin özü, filozoflar güzel sorular sorsalar da cevapları gösterecek teknikten yoksunlar. O nedenle tartışmalarına çok da rağbet etmemek lazım. Nasıl bir ilerleme katettiklerini sorarak da cevaplayabiliriz bu soruyu. Örneğin atomun mahiyeti gibi, zamanında felsefi addedilen birçok sorun artık fiziğin bir parçası haline geldi. Bazıları, filozofların esas amacının, çözülemeyen sorunlarla uğraşmak olduğunu öne sürse de, sorunlar nihayetinde çözüme ulaşıyor ve bu da bilimsel bir yolla gerçekleşiyor. Bir filozofun bir sorunu çözmede başarıya ulaştığı kaç tane örnek var diye soracak olursanız, bildiğim kadarıyla hiçbir örnek yok.
Temelde filozofların kullandıkları esas teknik, düşünce deneyidir ve burada sonsuz tartışmalar yürütebilirsiniz. Mesela John Searle'ün Çince odasını ele alalım. Bence burada da aynı dezavantajlar söz konusu. Bu düşünce deneyine göre, yalnızca sentaks işini görebilen bir sistemin semantik işini görmesi mümkün değildir. Bunu söylediğinde artık ileri doğru atılacak bir adım kalmıyor ve zaten herhangi bir şekilde kanıtlamış da olmuyorsun. Bunun tek istisnası iki örnektir ki o da normalde filozof olarak addedilmeyen, filozoflar gibi de düşünmeyen ama eşitlikler ve görsel imgeler üzerinden düşünen biri tarafından, yani Einstein tarafından gerçekleştirildi.
What is found in biology is mechanisms, mechanisms built with chemical components and that are often modified by other, later, mechanisms added to the earlier ones. 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. While DNA could be claimed to be both simple and elegant, it must be remembered that DNA almost certainly originated fairly close to the origin of life when things were necessarily simple or they would not have got going. Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed, but rather evolved. It might be thought, therefore, that evolutionary arguments would play a large part in guiding biological research, but this is far from the case. It is difficult enough to study what is happening now. To figure out exactly what happened in evolution is even more difficult. Thus evolutionary achievements can be used as hints to suggest possible lines of research, but it is highly dangerous to trust them too much. It is all too easy to make mistaken inferences unless the process involved is already very well understood.
Philosophers have been especially concerned with the problem of consciousness—for example, how to explain the redness of red or the painfulness of pain. This is a very thorny issue. The problem springs from the fact that the redness of red that I perceive so vividly cannot be precisely communicated to another human being, at least in the ordinary course of events. If you cannot describe the properties of a thing unambiguously, you are likely to have some difficulty trying to explain these properties in reductionist terms.
Life, as we know it on earth, appears as a synthesis of two macromolecular systems. The proteins, because of their versatility and chemical reactivity, do all the work but are unable to replicate themselves in any simple way. The nucleic acids seem tailor-made for replication but can achieve rather little else compared with the more elaborate and better equipped proteins. RNA and DNA are the dumb blondes of the biomolecular world, fit mainly for reproduction (with a little help from proteins) but of little use for much of the really demanding work. The problem of the origin of life would be a great deal easier to approach if there were only one family of macromolecules, capable of doing both jobs, replication and catalysis, but life as we know it employs two families. This may well be due to the fact that no macromolecule exists which could conveniently carry out both functions, because of the limitations of organic chemistry; because, that is, of the nature of things.
If for example I had some idea, which as it turned out would be quite wrong, was going off of the tangent, Watson would tell me in no uncertain terms this was nonsense, and vice-versa. If he would have some idea I didn't like, and I would say so, this would shake his thinking about, and draw him back again. And in fact it is one of the requirements for collaborations of this sort, is you must be perfectly candid, one might almost say rude, to the person you're working with. It's useless working with somebody who is either much too junior than yourself or much too senior because then politeness creeps in. And this is the end of all real collaboration in science (giggles).