"The balance of evidence both from the cell-free system and from the study of mutation, suggests that this does not occur at random, and that triplets coding the same amino acid may well be rather similar"
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Crick is doing that very Crick move: sounding almost reluctant while quietly detonating a major assumption. The sentence is framed as a cautious weighing of “the balance of evidence,” but the real punchline is audacious for its era: the genetic code probably isn’t a cosmic roulette wheel. If codons (“triplets”) that specify the same amino acid are “rather similar,” then biology has built in a kind of error-handling logic. That’s not just a technical point; it’s a worldview shift. Randomness may drive mutation, but the system those mutations hit is engineered by evolution to be resilient.
The context is the early 1960s, when the code was being cracked with cell-free translation systems and mutation studies that linked changes in DNA/RNA to changes in protein. Those tools produced messy, partial signals; Crick’s signature is to treat messy evidence as a map. He’s triangulating across two experimental worlds to argue for a pattern: synonymous codons cluster, implying structure in the code table rather than arbitrary assignment.
The subtext is strategic humility. “May well be” and “rather similar” are hedges that keep the claim inside the tent of respectable inference, while still steering the field toward a powerful idea: degeneracy in the code is not mere redundancy, it’s robustness. Similar codons coding the same amino acid means a single base error can be less catastrophic - a molecular politics of damage control. Crick isn’t just describing how the code works; he’s sketching why it might have evolved to work that way.
The context is the early 1960s, when the code was being cracked with cell-free translation systems and mutation studies that linked changes in DNA/RNA to changes in protein. Those tools produced messy, partial signals; Crick’s signature is to treat messy evidence as a map. He’s triangulating across two experimental worlds to argue for a pattern: synonymous codons cluster, implying structure in the code table rather than arbitrary assignment.
The subtext is strategic humility. “May well be” and “rather similar” are hedges that keep the claim inside the tent of respectable inference, while still steering the field toward a powerful idea: degeneracy in the code is not mere redundancy, it’s robustness. Similar codons coding the same amino acid means a single base error can be less catastrophic - a molecular politics of damage control. Crick isn’t just describing how the code works; he’s sketching why it might have evolved to work that way.
Quote Details
| Topic | Science |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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