Dyadic pairing - a two conversation with a chosen friend

Francis Crick (wikipedia) intellectual technique, thoughout his life, was a dyadic pairing, a long running two way conversation with a chosen friend somewhere between an interrogation and a Socratic dialogue (wikipedia). In the periods when he had no such sounding board, he was visibly at a loss. Georg Krissel was the first to take the part, later filled in turn by Jim Watson, Sydney Brenner and Christof Koch. (source: Francis Crick by Matt Ridley, Chapter 2, pg 17).

Has Internet Chat largely replaced dyadic pairing today?

Videos: Human Genome Collection by Nature journal

• 5 Videos
• Introduction, How it Started, How it was paid for, Practical Implications, Ethics
  

Francis Crick: Discoverer of the Genetic Code by Matt Ridley

• Podcast - Matt Ridley talking to New Scientist (8 mins).
• BHA Darwin Day Lecture 2007 Monday February 12th, 2007 - Tickets available. Speakers: Richard Dawkins and Matt Ridley
  
• Review by New Scientist:-

FRANCIS CRICK did not fit the stereotype of a scientific genius. He was not eccentric, shy or even absent-minded. Rather, he was extrovert, loud (his braying laugh often annoyed), gregarious and fond of pretty girls. He was striking-looking, too: tall, with blue eyes.

Worse still for purveyors of cliché, some of his best thoughts came to him in pubs rather than labs, and were developed through endless conversations, especially with a series of close intellectual partners. Among them were Jim Watson (who described him as "the brightest person I have ever known"), Sydney Brenner, who shared a lab and visits to the Eagle pub with Crick for 20 years, and the young neuroscientist Christof Koch, with whom Crick worked for the last 18 years of his life. Special partner or not, the rules were always the same: "there was no shame in floating a stupid idea, but no umbrage was to be taken if the other person said it was stupid".

All this we learn from Matt Ridley's biography of Francis Crick, the first account of his life to appear since he died in 2004. It is an excellent, fast-paced tale of a long, astonishing life: Crick could serve as exemplar for late starters and for those who refuse to quit.

Born in 1916 in the English east Midlands, into a family of Northamptonshire shoe manufacturers whose business had gone to pot, he managed only a second-class degree in physics before the second world war arrived, and went off to work on anti-ship mines at the Admiralty. He finally gained a research studentship at Cambridge at the age of 31, and, at 35, as Jim Watson put it, "he was almost totally unknown... and most people thought he talked too much". Yet within a couple of years, in 1953, he and Watson had cracked DNA.

Ridley is right to say that elucidating DNA's structure was not Crick's greatest achievement. He showed his real genius over the following decades as the central theorist and driving force of the new science of molecular biology. Along the way there were wonderful eureka moments. Ridley tells the story of Crick, Brenner and others interrogating the leading bacterial geneticist François Jacob when: "Suddenly, Brenner let out a 'yelp'. He began talking fast. Crick began talking back just as fast. Everybody else in the room watched in amazement. Brenner had seen the answer and Crick had seen him see it." This was the moment they solved the problem of how the DNA code was turned into protein: messenger RNA was read at a ribosome like a tape in a tape reader.

Crick's ambitions were always immodest. In 1946, when he decided to re-enter science, he said that he must do something "heroic" and "explode a mystery". The only problem was deciding whether to crack "the secret of the brain or the secret of life" first.

It was not until he was in his early 60s that he began to switch from molecular biology to neurobiology, settling at one of the leading research centres, the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. At the late age of 80, Crick wrote with Koch the defining paper on the neural correlate of consciousness; eight years later, on the day he died, Crick was still working on a final, important paper.

So what was it like to work with Crick? Here Ridley's scientific biography cannot match Watson's intensely personal book, The Double Helix, with his up-close sketches of the unbearably quick-minded Crick refusing to hide from his colleagues that they "did not realise the real meaning of their latest experiments". My own recollection of conversation with Crick was his rejoinder to an idea of mine: "Let me explain why I think that is nonsense." This was neither arrogance nor rudeness; he was simply inviting you to join him in argument on his lifelong quest for truth.

“He was totally unknown... and he talked too much”

That last paper of Crick's was typical. He was examining the little-known brain structure called the claustrum, which he thought might be critical in tying together the components of consciousness. Experiments, he felt, were urgently needed. The paper ends: "What could be more important? So why wait?"

As Ridley recounts, on 28 July 2004 Crick was correcting the paper when he "became semi-coherent, imagining that Christof Koch was there and arguing with him". Later that day he died. With a little more time, perhaps he would have cracked his second secret too.

From issue 2576 of New Scientist magazine, 04 November 2006, page 53

Quotes by Richard Dawkins

over 50 quotes by Richard Dawkins.
source: http://richarddawkins.net/quotes

"The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry."

"There's this thing called being so open-minded your brains drop out."

"...when two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong."

"With so many mindbytes to be downloaded, so many mental codons to be replicated, it is no wonder that child brains are gullible, open to almost any suggestion, vulnerable to subversion, easy prey to Moonies, Scientologists and nuns."

"...it is a telling fact that, the world over, the vast majority of children follow the religion of their parents rather than any of the other available religions."

"Like computer viruses, successful mind viruses will tend to be hard for their victims to detect. If you are the victim of one, the chances are that you won't know it, and may even vigorously deny it."

"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'."

"What are all of us but self-reproducing robots? We have been put together by our genes and what we do is roam the world looking for a way to sustain ourselves and ultimately produce another robot child."

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear."

"We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further."

"The patient typically finds himself impelled by some deep, inner conviction that something is true, or right, or virtuous: a conviction that doesn't seem to owe anything to evidence or reason, but which, nevertheless, he feels as totally compelling and convincing. We doctors refer to such a belief as 'faith'."

"We admit that we are like apes, but we seldom realise that we are apes."

"Hot on the heels of its magnanimous pardoning of Galileo, the Vatican has now moved with even more lightning speed to recognise the truth of Darwinism."

"Religious people split into three main groups when faced with science. I shall label them the "know-nothings", the "know-alls", and the "no-contests""

"Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence."

"There may be fairies at the bottom of the garden. There is no evidence for it, but you can't prove that there aren't any, so shouldn't we be agnostic with respect to fairies?"

"Science offers us an explanation of how complexity (the difficult) arose out of simplicity (the easy). The hypothesis of God offers no worthwhile explanation for anything, for it simply postulates what we are trying to explain."

"Thus the creationist's favourite question "What is the use of half an eye?" Actually, this is a lightweight question, a doddle to answer. Half an eye is just 1 per cent better than 49 per cent of an eye..."

"For the kinds of small animals we are talking about, we can assume one generation per year, so it seems that it would take less than half a million years to evolve a good camera eye."

"Aquarius is a miscellaneous set of stars all at different distances from us, which have no connection with each other except that they constitute a (meaningless) pattern when seen from a certain (not particularly special) place in the galaxy (here)."

"Scientific truth is too beautiful to be sacrificed for the sake of light entertainment or money. Astrology is an aesthetic affront. It cheapens astronomy, like using Beethoven for commercial jingles."

"Paranormal phenomena have a habit of going away whenever they are tested under rigorous conditions. This is why the $740,000 reward of James Randi, offered to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal effect under proper scientific controls, is safe."

"If you are in possession of this revolutionary secret of science, why not prove it and be hailed as the new Newton? Of course, we know the answer. You can't do it. You are a fake."

"The universe is a strange and wondrous place. The truth is quite odd enough to need no help from pseudoscientific charlatans."

"You could give Aristotle a tutorial. And you could thrill him to the core of his being ... Such is the privilege of living after Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Planck, Watson, Crick and their colleagues."

"For the first half of geological time our ancestors were bacteria. Most creatures still are bacteria, and each one of our trillions of cells is a colony of bacteria."

"It has become almost a cliché to remark that nobody boasts of ignorance of literature, but it is socially acceptable to boast ignorance of science."

"if you want to do evil, science provides the most powerful weapons to do evil; but equally, if you want to do good, science puts into your hands the most powerful tools to do so."

"It's been suggested that if the supernaturalists really had the powers they claim, they'd win the lottery every week. I prefer to point out that they could also win a Nobel Prize for discovering fundamental physical forces hitherto unknown to science."

"The world and the universe is an extremely beautiful place, and the more we understand about it the more beautiful does it appear."

"There are all sorts of things that would be comforting. I expect an injection of morphine would be comforting... But to say that something is comforting is not to say that it's true."

"I think it is not helpful to apply Darwinian language too widely. Conquest of nation by nation is too distant for Darwinian explanations to be helpful."

"Group selection of any kind is not Darwinism as Darwin understood it nor as I understand it."

"Certainly I see the scientific view of the world as incompatible with religion, but that is not what is interesting about it. It is also incompatible with magic, but that also is not worth stressing. What is interesting about the scientific world view is that it is true, inspiring, remarkable and that it unites a whole lot of phenomena under a single heading."

"...the stereo- type of scientists being scruffy nerds with rows of pens in their top pocket is just about as wicked as racist stereotypes."

"I want science to be taken seriously, because, after all, it's less ephemeral--it has a more eternal aspect than whatever the politics of the day might be, which, of course, gets the lead in the news."

"Religions do make claims about the universe--the same kinds of claims that scientists make, except they're usually false."

"It is almost as if the human brain were specifically designed to misunderstand Darwinism, and to find it hard to believe.."

"Who will say with confidence that sexual abuse is more permanently damaging to children than threatening them with the eternal and unquenchable fires of hell?"

"I am against religion because it teaches us to be satisfied with not understanding the world."

"I doubt that religion can survive deep understanding. The shallows are its natural habitat. Cranks and fundamentalists are too often victimised as scapegoats for religion in general. It is only quite recently that Christianity reinvented itself in non-fundamentalist guise, and Islam has yet to do so (see Ibn Warraq's excellent book, Why I am not a Muslim). Moonies and scientologists get a bad press, but they just haven't been around as long as the accepted religions. Theology is a respectable discipline when it studies such subjects as moral philosophy, the psychology of religious belief and, above all, biblical history and literature. Like Bertie Wooster, my knowledge of the Bible is above average. I seem to know Ecclesiastes and the Song of Solomon almost by heart. I think that the Bible as literature should be a compulsory part of the national curriculum - you can't understand English literature and culture without it. But insofar as theology studies the nature of the divine, it will earn the right to be taken seriously when it provides the slightest, smallest smidgen of a reason for believing in the existence of the divine. Meanwhile, we should devote as much time to studying serious theology as we devote to studying serious fairies and serious unicorns. "