"If the code does indeed have some logical foundation then it is legitimate to consider all the evidence, both good and bad, in any attempt to deduce it"
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Crick is doing something deceptively radical here: dressing a rebellious scientific attitude in the calm clothes of “legitimacy.” The line is a permission slip, but it’s also a warning shot at a certain kind of tidy-minded researcher who wants to curate reality until it agrees with their theory. If the “code” has a logical foundation, he argues, then the investigator has no moral or methodological right to avert their eyes from the inconvenient parts of the record. Bad evidence isn’t an embarrassment to be hidden; it’s a stress test.
The subtext is Popperian without name-checking Popper: a hypothesis earns its seriousness by surviving attempts to break it. Crick’s phrasing matters. “Does indeed” implies skepticism up front; he’s not assuming the code exists, only granting the possibility. “Legitimate” signals the social dimension of science - what the community permits as fair play. He’s speaking to an ecosystem where careers, prestige, and intellectual fashion can quietly incentivize selective attention.
Contextually, Crick is a founding voice of molecular biology, a field built on the idea that life’s complexity can be read as information - a “code” not of mysticism but of mechanism. In the long wake of discovering DNA’s structure and pushing toward the genetic code, it would have been tempting to treat anomalies as noise on the road to a triumphant decoding. Crick insists that decoding is only real if it can metabolize its contradictions. The elegance of the line is that it makes rigor sound like ethics: you don’t get to call it logic if you refuse the full ledger.
The subtext is Popperian without name-checking Popper: a hypothesis earns its seriousness by surviving attempts to break it. Crick’s phrasing matters. “Does indeed” implies skepticism up front; he’s not assuming the code exists, only granting the possibility. “Legitimate” signals the social dimension of science - what the community permits as fair play. He’s speaking to an ecosystem where careers, prestige, and intellectual fashion can quietly incentivize selective attention.
Contextually, Crick is a founding voice of molecular biology, a field built on the idea that life’s complexity can be read as information - a “code” not of mysticism but of mechanism. In the long wake of discovering DNA’s structure and pushing toward the genetic code, it would have been tempting to treat anomalies as noise on the road to a triumphant decoding. Crick insists that decoding is only real if it can metabolize its contradictions. The elegance of the line is that it makes rigor sound like ethics: you don’t get to call it logic if you refuse the full ledger.
Quote Details
| Topic | Reason & Logic |
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