Francis Crick — "It is notoriously difficult to get rid of a really bad idea."
It is notoriously difficult to get rid of a really bad idea.
Get This Quote & Author's Image Illustrated On:
Click any product to generate a realistic preview. Up to 3 at a time.
* Initial load can take up to 90 seconds — revising the preview in another color is nearly instant.
Kitchen
Apparel
Other
More from Francis Crick
"One of the most striking features of the universe is that it is so empty."
"The future of biology is in the brain."
"The brain is the most complex thing in the universe."
"The belief that we have immortal souls is a superstition."
"If you want to be a scientist, you have to be prepared to be wrong a lot."
Verification
Unverifiable
Found in 1 providers: grok
1 source checked
Understanding this quote
What it means
Bad ideas are surprisingly tenacious. Once an idea—scientific, political, or cultural—becomes established, it resists correction even when evidence clearly contradicts it. People who've built careers, reputations, or worldviews around a flawed concept will defend it, teach it, and institutionalize it. The quote recognizes a core problem in human reasoning: we're far better at adopting ideas than abandoning them, and the worse the idea, the harder it often is to displace.
Relevance to Francis Crick
Crick lived this truth firsthand. Before the 1953 double helix discovery, the dominant belief was that proteins, not DNA, carried genetic information. Displacing it required overwhelming evidence and years of resistance. Crick also championed the Central Dogma of molecular biology against persistent misinterpretations. He was famously blunt and impatient with ideas he judged wrong, spending decades watching flawed theories linger in labs, textbooks, and public consciousness long after disproof.
The era
Crick worked during biology's most transformative century. The 1950s–80s saw repeated battles against entrenched bad ideas: protein-based heredity, vitalism, Lamarckian inheritance. Soviet Lysenkoism—state-enforced pseudoscience that devastated agricultural genetics—showed how catastrophically bad ideas persist when protected by power. The era also saw the rise of peer review and big science, which paradoxically could entrench consensus errors. Kuhn's 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions gave formal language to exactly what Crick had observed.
AI-generated insights based on extensive research and information for context. Factual errors? Email [email protected].