Looking for a quote by Francis Crick

by Doug Mason 9 Replies latest watchtower bible

• 

  Doug Mason

  Page 21 of the Watchtower’s 2010 brochure, “The Origin of Life” says of the biologist

  “Francis Crick … decided that DNA is far too organized to have come about through undirected events”.

  I cannot find this quotation being made in writing by Crick himself.

  The WTS’s brochure refers to the book, “The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence – A Philosophical Inquiry”, by David Lamb but it is not clear to me that the brochure is saying this view by Crick is being cited in Lamb's book.

  Where will I be able to read this statement being made by Francis Crick?

  ======

  And while we are looking at that WTS brochure, page 16 makes some interesting claims about teaspoons. It points to Endnote 21.. However, Endnote 21 does not contain many of the words at page 16

  The following words do not appear in the article listed as Endnote 21: dense, information, teaspoonful, instructions, building, 350, humans, alive, today, seven, billion, people, living, earth, barely, make, film, teaspoon.

  So where did the author get his ideas from?

  Doug
• 

  Phizzy

  This may help you Doug,

  I don't know who wrote the whole Paper this is from, or where I got it from, but I will e-mail you the whole thing, it is an interesting read ! here is the relevant paragraph :

  " The concluding paragraphs of this subsection of TOL are devoted to misrepresenting a famous scientist and irrelevantly quoting a well known philosopher. A decades-old book authored by Francis Crick detailing directed panspermia, the idea that genetic material was launched to Earth by intelligent extraterrestrials, is used to erect a weak criticism of any theory about the natural origin of DNA. Crick’s ideas on this subject were never widely accepted among scientists, and even Crick himself later withdrew his criticisms of origin of life research in light of progress in the field. [67] Another poorly aimed rhetorical dart is the anecdotal change of heart by former atheist philosopher Anthony Flew. Flew being a philosopher and not a biologist, his personal views regarding the origin of DNA have little weight in a largely technical scientific discussion." ( Another example of the JW writer deliberately misquoting, i.e obfuscating the argument, or more succinctly, telling lies)

  Good to see you are still firing on all cylinders !
• 

  Anders Andersen

  Doug,

  The brochure itself refers to the source. It's taken from The Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence — A Philosophical Inquiry, David Lamb, 2001, blz. 83.

  You can freely download a copy of that publication here: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12097898_The_search_for_extraterrestrial_intelligence

  Edit: can't find the quote yet either...
• 

  Doug Mason

  THANK YOU! THANK YOU!

  I am so fortunate to have such good and knowledgeable friends.

  Doug
  
• 

  Anders Andersen

  It appears the authors of the brochure didn't understand a single thing in Lamb's paper, or they simply messed up the reference to the source.

  Lamb refers to some of Crick's own writings, perhaps the quotes can be found there?
• 

  Anders Andersen

  Doug,

  Download this file: http://www.guilliard.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/Discussion-The-Origins-of-Life-Misquotes.pdf

  It's a commentary of the JW brochure. Search it for Crick and you'll find additional info on the quote.
• 

  Doug Mason

  There are two sentences in the brochure that relate to Francis Crick.

  “Francis Crick, a scientist who helped to discover DNA’s double-helix structure, decided that this molecule is far too organized to have come about through undirected events. He proposed that intelligent extraterrestrials may have sent DNA to the earth to help get life started here.[26]” TOL, page 21

  I can now see that the second sentence relates to Endnote 26, but I cannot see anything in Lamb’s book which relates to the first sentence. Thank you for making it possible for me to search Lamb’s book. That is invaluable. There is no appearance of “undirected” in the book and the appearances of the words “organized” and “events” are not relevant.

  I can see Creationist sites making this same attribution to Crick, and perhaps he did write this, but theses sites do not give me the location where Crick wrote that statement. He was obviously a prolific writer.

  ====================

  BTW. Does anyone know if this is the complete article (written in 1993 but ignored by Lamb):

  https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Anticipating-an-RNA-world.-Some-past-speculations-Orgel-Crick/a8a4c8521983efe740990963a01eed498e534b16
• 

  Anders Andersen

  Doug,

  No, that is not the entire article. It's merely an abstract.

  What I normally do is use sci-hub.tw to read scientific papers and articles. You need to copy the entire DOI number as shown on top of the page you linked to.

  DOI:10.1096/fasebj.7.1.7678564 in this case.
  

  A DOI number is a unique identifier for scientific publications.

  Paste the number in the search box on sci-hub.tw and the paper will be downloaded.

  This works for almost all publications that have a DOI or Pubmed ID.

  FYI legally this is a bit of a grey area. Sci-hub use credentials freely provided by persons with access to scientific library sites to login to those sites and download the paper for you. The library sites of course don't like this, but they have no copyright to the papers they're hosting. Those papers were originally published for free by scientists. Now I don't care about that too much and I use sci-hub often. Knowledge should be free ;-)
• 

  Doug Mason

  Anders,

  Brilliant. Thank you.

  Thank you!

  Doug
• 

  Doug Mason

  Anders,

  If you email me, I am prepared to show you what I have done thus far, so that you could provide me with your considered criticisms and recommendations. I reckon I am about half way through and it will take me another 2 or 3 weeks before I come up for air.

  https://jwstudies.com/contact_me.html

  I never break confidences.

  Doug