Nonetheless, I believe he was headed in the right direction. We leave matters of semantic hygiene to you philosophers."Ĭrick did not, in my opinion, succeed in solving consciousness (whatever that might mean). He'd barely started when a gentleman in attendance raised a hand and said, "But Doctor Crick, you haven't even bothered to define the word consciousness before embarking on this." Crick's response was memorable: "I'd remind you that there was never a time in the history of biology when a bunch of us sat around the table and said, 'Let's first define what we mean by life.' We just went out there and discovered what it was-a double helix. I remember a seminar Crick was giving on consciousness at the Salk Institute here in La Jolla. The erudite Colin McGinn has written, for instance, "The brain is only tangentially relevant to consciousness." (There are many philosophers who would disagree, e.g., Churchland, Dennett, and Searle.)Īfter his triumph with heredity, Crick turned to what he called the "second great riddle" in biology-consciousness. I am stating the obvious here only because there are some philosophers, called "new mysterians," who believe the opposite. I believe there are similar correlations between brain structure and mind function, between neurons and consciousness. They saw the analogy between the complementarity of molecular strands and the complementarity of parent and offspring-why pigs beget pigs and not sheep. Localization was critical, as, indeed, it may prove to be for brain function.Ĭrick and Watson didn't just describe DNA's structure, they explained its significance. Inspired by Griffith and Avery, Crick and Watson realized that the answer to the problem of heredity lay in the structure of DNA. In biology, knowledge of structure often leads to knowledge of function-one need look no further than the whole of medical history. Later, Oswald Avery showed that DNA was the transformative principle here. Chromosomes are composed of histones and DNA as early as 1928, the British bacteriologist Fred Griffith showed that a harmless species of bacterium, upon incubation with a heat-killed virulent species, actually changes into the virulent species! This was almost as startling as a pig walking into a room with a sheep and two sheep emerging. Then Thomas Morgan showed that fruit flies zapped with x-rays became mutants with punctate changes in their chromosomes, yielding the clear conclusion that the chromosomes are where the action is. Less well known is the chain of events culminating in this discovery.įirst, Mendel's laws dictated that genes are particulate (a first approximation still held to be accurate). It is well known that Crick and Watson unraveled the double helical structure of the DNA molecule: two twisting complementary strands of nucleotides. Will a solution of similar elegance emerge for the problem of consciousness?
Crick himself cautioned against the pursuit of elegance in biology, given that evolution proceeds happenstantially-"God is a hacker," he famously said, adding (according to my colleague Don Hoffman), "Many a young biologist has slit his own throat with Ockham's razor." Yet his own solution to the riddle of heredity ranks with natural selection as biology's most elegant discovery. The ability to grasp analogies, and seeing the difference between deep and superficial ones, is a hallmark of many great scientists Francis Crick and James Watson were no exception.
I'll argue that the same strategy used to crack the genetic code might prove successful in cracking the "neural code" of consciousness and self. What's my favorite elegant idea? The elucidation of DNA's structure is surely the most obvious, but it bears repeating.