Science Quote by Francis Crick

Crick is doing something that looks almost quaint now: modeling scientific humility in real time, without surrendering momentum. The line turns on two small moves. First, the phrase "It would appear" keeps the claim on a leash. He is observing a pattern, not declaring a law. Second, he undercuts his own inference with a sharper caveat: "less secure than our other deductions". That self-edit is the point. In a period when molecular biology was racing from elegant hypotheses to sweeping narratives, Crick is signaling a hierarchy of confidence - and inviting the reader to track it with him.

The subject matter, "nonsense triplets", sits right at the mid-century drama of cracking the genetic code: which codons correspond to amino acids, and which act as stop signals. You can hear the laboratory reality in "only occasionally come across them". Rare events in biology are rarely just rare; they're often hard to detect, easy to misclassify, and vulnerable to the quirks of experimental systems. Crick is acknowledging a classic trap: absence of evidence masquerading as evidence of absence.

The subtext is methodological discipline. He's reminding colleagues that the genetic code's "general nature" (its regularities, constraints, and logic) can be inferred more robustly than the frequency of edge cases. It's a quiet rebuke to overconfident pattern-matching: treat the tidy parts as provisional, but treat the messy parts as suspect. That stance helped make the code decipherable rather than mythic - a map built with error bars, not bravado.