It Has Not Escaped Our Notice That

We Are Sometimes Asked What The Result Would Be If We Put Four +'s In One Gene. To Answer This My Colleagues Have Recently Put Together Not Merely Four But Six +'s.

To Produce A Really Good Biological Theory One Must Try To See Through The Clutter Produced By Evolution To The Basic Mechanisms Lying Beneath Them, Realizing That They Are Likely To Be Overlaid By Other, Secondary Mechanisms. What Seems To Physicists To Be A Hopelessly Complicated Process May Have Been What Nature Found Simplest, Because Nature Could Only Build On What Was Already There.

While Occam's Razor Is A Useful Tool In The Physical Sciences, It Can Be A Very Dangerous Implement In Biology. It Is Thus Very Rash To Use Simplicity And Elegance As A Guide In Biological Research.

If Watson And I Had Not Discovered The [dna] Structure, Instead Of Being Revealed With A Flourish It Would Have Trickled Out And That Its Impact Would Have Been Far Less. For This Sort Of Reason Stent Had Argued That A Scientific Discovery Is More Akin To A Work Of Art Than Is Generally Admitted. Style, He Argues, Is As Important As Content. I Am Not Completely Convinced By This Argument, At Least In This Case.

I Also Suspect That Many Workers In This Field [molecular Biology] And Related Fields Have Been Strongly Motivated By The Desire, Rarely Actually Expressed, To Refute Vitalism.