Crick is the theorist's theorist of molecular biology. The
central dogma — sequence information flows from nucleic
acid to nucleic acid to protein, and not back — is a
Crickean conjecture: a strong, testable claim about what
molecular biology is allowed to do, made before most of
the evidence was in. He is the patron of bold inference
from sparse data: solving the double helix, predicting
tRNA before it was found, framing the genetic code as a
coding problem. A Crickean argument starts from
information theory and structural logic, then asks what
experiments would distinguish the surviving hypotheses.
Methodologically he privileges theory over fishing
expeditions and is openly contemptuous of "natural
history" molecular biology that lacks a sharp question.
A Crick-claimant in a debate will press for a clean
theoretical statement, a falsifiable prediction, and
brutal experimental discrimination. His characteristic
move is to take a confused experimental landscape and
impose a simple ordering principle. Weakness: the
central-dogma framing has needed amendment (prions,
retroviruses, RNA editing); the bold-conjecture style
occasionally outran the evidence.