[Mark Steyn] Evolutionary Figure: Steyn on Francis Crick

Atlantic Monthly via Steyn Online ^ | October 2004 | Mark Steyn

[NovemberCharlie]

Steyn's Obituary of Francis Crick.

[NovemberCharlie]

Ping to the Steyn List.

[Diogenesis]

Crick was the beneficiary of the stolen work of a woman colleague.
Her work was handed to him by his friend (Wilkins) who filched it.
Wilkins (who stole the DNA structure revealing radiograph) did no work
on the key scatter-photograph which was made by Franklin
using her innovatively cooled equipment AND a DNA strand
WHICH SHE had previously separated from its A form.

[shield]

bmp

[marron]

you can only unmask the mystery of humanity by denying our humanity.

Actually, the more we uncover, the more fascinating it gets.

Great piece just the same.

[lelio]

The man of science who confidently dismissed God at Mill Hill School half a century earlier appears not to have noticed that he'd merely substituted for his culturally inherited monotheism a weary variant on Graeco-Roman-Norse pantheism - the gods in the skies who fertilise the earth and then retreat to the heavens beyond our reach.

How silly. Best to reduce it all to one god as that's far more sensible.

[maikeru]

From the above article:
" In 1963, when a benefactor offered to fund a chapel and Crick's fellow Fellows voted to accept the money, he refused to accept the argument that many at the college would appreciate a place of worship and that those who didn't were not obliged to enter it. He offered to fund a brothel on the same basis, and, when that was rejected, he resigned."

Gotta love it !... =)

[GSlob]

"Steyn's Obituary of Francis Crick."
Revenge of the pumpkins?

[VOA]

His militant atheism was good-humoured but fierce, and it drove him away from molecular biology.

I hope readers fully understand that sentence after reading the rest of Steyn's paragraph.

The milieau in molecular biology is atheistic/materialistic.
There are people of faith in the field, but most are closeted.
One of the rare examples of the "uncloseted" that comes to mind is
Francis Collins of The Human Genome Project.

[aruanan]

"We were lucky with DNA," he said. "Like America, it was just waiting to be discovered."

Yeah, they were lucky some hardworking woman came up with the evidence that DNA was helical and had an external rather than internal backbone, evidence which they appropriated in a sneaky way without attribution. Like America, DNA was just waiting to be ripped off from its discoverers.

[Paul_B]

> Evolution, whatever offence it gives, by definition emphasizes how far man has come from his tree-swinging forebears. DNA, by contrast, seems reductive. Man and chimp share 98.5% of their genetic code, which would be no surprise to Darwin. But we also share 75% of our genetic make-up with the pumpkin. The pumpkin is just a big ridged orange lump lying on the ground all day, like a fat retiree on the beach in Florida. But other than that he has no discernible human characteristics until your kid carves them into him.

Evolution is pretty darn reductive too. But in any case, these figures of shared genetics make human life all the more wondrous... and sacred.

[Verginius Rufus]

Like America, DNA was just waiting to be discovered...and Crick was its Amerigo Vespucci.

[Cicero]

The woman in question is Brenda Maddox. See:

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/photo51/

I don't know how much credit she actually deserves; these matters of scientific discovery are often very complicated. But one side of the story at least is presented there.

[hosepipe]

Mark must have overdosed on american politics... can't say I blame him... about there mesef....

[Mr Ramsbotham]

He didn’t see it that way, of course. His last major work, The Astonishing Hypothesis, was a full-scale assault on human feeling. “The Astonishing Hypothesis," trumpeted Crick, “is that ‘You,’ your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behavior of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. As Lewis Carroll’s Alice might have phrased it: ‘You’re nothing but a pack of neurons.’”

Ah, but there's that nagging problem of consciousness.

[Ruth A.]

"Directed Panspermia", which is not a Clinton DNA joke

I could kiss Steyn on the lips when he pops off like this.

75% pumpkin related? It seems the pumpkin patch stories about birth were closer to the truth than suspected.

[NovemberCharlie]

Not really; he does an obit for the Atlantic Monthly once a month. Previous articles still on his website include Ray Charles and Fay Wray.

[knews_hound]

Marker

[RightWingAtheist]

While the Vespucci analogy is perfect when discussing Crick, the "Colombus" of DNA was Oswald Avery.