“The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry.”

— Francis Crick

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1966, p. 10.
Of Molecules and Men (1966)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry." by Francis Crick?

Francis Crick photo

Francis Crick16

British molecular biologist, biophysicist, neuroscientist; … 1916–2004

Related quotes

“[Biology has] become the paramount science, exceeding other disciplines, including physics and chemistry at least, in the creative tumult of its disciplines and disputations. […] I'll also be so bold at this point to suggest that we are now at the edge of establishing the two fundamental laws of biology: The first law is that all of the phenomena of biology, the entities and the processes, are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics and chemistry. Not immediately reducible to them, but ultimately consistent and in consilience with them, by a cause and effect explanation. The second law is that all biological phenomena, these entities and processes that define life itself, have arisen by evolution through natural selection.”

Edward O. Wilson (1929) American biologist

Talk at the 50th anniversary of New Scientist magazine (2006).

“As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism.”

Eric R. Kandel (1929) American neuropsychiatrist

The Age of Insight (2012)
Context: As astronomy and physics inspired the Enlightenment, so biology inspired Modernism.... This new view led to a reexamination in art of the biological nature of human existence, as evident in Édouard Manet's Déjeuner sur l’Herbe... Manet's painting... reveals a theme... the complex relationship between the sexes and between fantasy and reality.... also startlingly modern because of its style. Several decades before Cézanne began to collapse three dimension into two, Manet here had already flattened the viewer's sense of perspective...

“Einstein was just a genius of theoretical physics. If you introduced him to biology or chemistry, he would look like a fish trying to climb a tree.”

Mwanandeke Kindembo (1996) Congolese author

“Indeed, many of the founding members of the Laboratory of Molecular Biology were immigrants themselves, and they helped to revolutionise modern biology.”

Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (1952) Nobel prize winning American and British structural biologist

Quoted in "Knighthood for Venkatraman Ramakrishnan".

“With each new discovery of chemistry, physics, biology, the anthropological sciences, of the practical application of sound principles, dogma collapses. It is a part of that old edifice of religion which crumbles and falls in ruins.”

Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) Duce and President of the Council of Ministers of Italy. Leader of the National Fascist Party and subsequen…

1900s, God Does Not Exist (1904)

“At first the Vienna Circle analysed ‘physics’ in a narrower sense almost exclusively; now psychology, biology, sociology. The task of this movement is unified science and nothing less.”

Otto Neurath (1882–1945) austrian economist, philosopher and sociologist

Source: 1930s, "Physicalism" (1931), p. 52

“The entire recent history of biology shows that we are, to a remarkable degree, the results of the interactions of an extremely complex array of molecules; and the aspect of biology that was once considered its holy of holies, the nature of the genetic material, has now been fundamentally understood in terms of the chemistry of its constituent nucleic acids, DNA and RNA, and their operational agents, the proteins.”

Carl Sagan (1934–1996) American astrophysicist, cosmologist, author and science educator

Introduction (p. 7)
The Dragons of Eden (1977)

“Physics is becoming the study of organization. In this way … it will converge with biology and psychology.”

Wolfgang Köhler (1887–1967) German-American psychologist and phenomenologist

Source: Gestalt Psychology. 1930, p. 30

“Men are not allowed to think freely about chemistry and biology: why should they be allowed to think freely about political philosophy?”

Auguste Comte (1798–1857) French philosopher

As quoted in A Dictionary of Scientific Quotations (1991) by Alan Lindsay Mackay

“The recognition of certain basic impossibilities has laid the foundations of some major principles of physics and chemistry; similarly, recognition of the impossibility of understanding living things in terms of physics and chemistry, far from setting limits to our understanding of life, will guide it in the right direction. And even if the demonstration of this impossibility should prove of no great advantage in the pursuit of discovery, such a demonstration would help to draw a truer image of life and man than that given us by the present basic concepts of biology.”

Michael Polanyi (1891–1976) Hungarian-British polymath

Life's irreducible structure (1968)

Related topics