NOT ACCORDING TO HOYLE -

by John W. Oller, Jr., Ph.D.

University of New Mexico

Darwinism is the game and Sir Fred Hoyle (1915-present), the

distinguished astronomer, is the odds maker. He says, no. Just

plain no.

It couldn't happen without intelligence. His reasoning

slams like a steel door against ANY kind of accidental evolution,

and several have recently proposed in one form or another to plug

the holes in neo-Darwinism--especially the gaps in the fossil

record.

Now that evolutionists admit openly that the fossil record never

did support the neo-Darwinian orthodoxy after all, they need a

substitute. Stephen Jay GOuld has proposed reviving the despised

view of Goldschmidt who believed in "hopeful monsters"", the idea

that something like a dog, say, might just hatch from, say a

chicken's egg once in a great while. Another idea, a less popular

one, is Jean Piaget's recommendation to reinstate the long

rejected Lamarckism--the view that learned or acquired traits

might be passed on from one generation to the next. And still

another is Hoyle's own proposal, a remarkable mutation of

neo-Darwinism.

In his well-illustrated and impressive book, THE INTELLIGENT

UNIVERSE (London: Michael Joseph, 1983, 256 pp), Hoyle says:

"...as biochemists discover more and more about the

awesome complexity of life, it is apparent that it's

chances of originating by accident are so minute that

they can be completely ruled out. Life cannot have risen

by chance (pp.11-12).

Does this mean that Hoyle has become a creationist? Well, not

exactly, and he doesn't expect to either. to forestall any

speculation about his apparent "conversion," he says bluntly: "I

am not a Christian, nor am I likely to become one as far as I can

tell (p. 251)." Still, Hoyle argues that there must have been

some "intelligence" behind the emergence of life on Earth. Setting

aside the questions of what sort of intelligence, he offers an

interesting line of argument.

The probability that the simplest life-form could just

accidentally arrange itself from particles floating in an ideally

prepared primordial soup is very slim.

To appreciate just how

slim, Hoyle proposes an analogy. He asks how long it would take a

blindfolded person to solve a Rubik Cube. Suppose he worked very

fast; say, a move a second without resting. According to Hoyle's

figuring it would take approximately 67.5 times the estimated age

of the universe (allowing the generous figure of 15 billion years

since the big bang), for him to reach a solution--about 1.35

TRILLION years.

Judging from the life expectancy of human beings

we could say that a solution of the Rubik Cube could not be

achieved at all by a blindfolded person. Yet this is just about

the same difficulty as the accidental formation of just ONE of

the chains of the amino acids necessary to living cells. In the

human cell, Hoyle points out, there are about 200,000 such

proteins. the chance of getting all 200,000 by accident is really

small.

In fact, eve if an ideal primordial soup existed, and if

it were repeatedly jolted by electrical charges (as in the famous

Miller-Ulrey experiment), the time required for the formation of

any one of the requisite 200,000 proteins would be roughly

equivalent to 293.5 times the estimated age of the Earth (set at

the standard 4.6 billion years).

Yet the odds against the accidental formation of a living

organism are considerably worse than the odds against a

blindfolded solution of the rubik Cube--the later being

estimated by Hoyle to be about 50 billion trillion to 1. The

trouble is that even a simple protozoan, or a bacterium requires prior

information of about 2,000 enzymes, themselves also complex proteins,

which are critical to the successful formation of all the other 190,000

or so requisite proteins. the odds in favor of the accidental formation

of all 2000 by accident (never mind the 198,000), without which no

living organism could have come into existence, approaches a truly

infinitesimal magnitude.

The odds would be similar to those 2000

BLINDFOLDED persons working the Rubik Cubes independently and just

accidentally coming to perfect solutions simultaneously--according to

Hoyle, roughly 10^400000 to 1. Or, to give a more graspable notion of

the improbability, Hoyle says, it would be roughly comparable to rolling

double-sixes 50,000 times in a row with unloaded dice.

Looking at it

from the point of view from the expected time lapse before reaching a

solution, the predicted heat death of our solar system would have occurred

early on, and our Milky way galaxy would have rolled itself up like a

scroll long before a solution could be hoped for.

In the next phase of his argument, the British scholar gets down to bare

knuckles. He says that anyone foolish enough to believe that the

solution to the life-problem might just come about by accident is guilty

of "junkyard mentality." The basis for this phrase is another analogy of

Hoyle's own creation. (Unfortunately, it seems to fit his own proposed

solution too, but more about that below).

He asked somewhat earlier, and

asks again in his 1983 book, what are the chances that a tornado might

blow through a junkyard containing the parts of a 747 and just

accidentally assemble it so as to leave it sitting there all set for

take-off. "So small as to be negligible, " he says, "even if a tornado

were to blow through enough junkyards to fill the whole Universe."

(p.19).

But many evolutionists may easily persuaded by the argument against the

junkyard mentality. they may be inclined to believe that the analogy of a

747 is quite interesting since there are conceivably multiplied billions

of possible aircraft designs, not to mention designs for other vehicles

yet to be imagined.

That is to say, some evolutionists might well be

inclined to suppose that there are many billions of possible solutions

inevitable as the shape of a totally new snowflake. But Hoyle has

anticipated their rebuttal and rejects it. He contends that in the

universe as we know it thee are uncountable "anthropic"

coincidences--intelligent accidents.

For instance, he sites the

approximate balance of oxygen and carbon atoms. Both are critical to

living organisms, and must be present in approximately equal quantities.

Otherwise, "a great excess of carbon would prevent the formation of many

materials on which life is dependent, rock and soil for example, while a

great oxygen excess would simply burn up any carbon-bearing bio chemicals

that happened to be around" (p.218).

Or, for another lucky coincidence, take the delicate balance inside the

hydrogen atom. Hoyle says:

"If the combined masses of the proton and electron were suddenly to

become a little more rather than a little less than the mass of the

neutron, the effect would be devastating. The hydrogen atom would become

unstable.

Throughout the universe all the hydrogen atom would

immediately break down to form neutrons and neutrinos. Robbed of its

nuclear fuel, the Sun would fade and collapse. Across the whole of

space, stars like the Sun would contract in their billions, releasing a

deadly flood of X-rays as they burned out. By that time life on earth,

needless to say, would already have been extinguished (pp 219-220).

These peculiar coincidences, the balance of oxygen and carbon and of

particles in the hydrogen atom (not to mention countless others), Hoyle

refers to as "anthropic--almost human, as if Someone were speaking to

us. He points out that there is no reason to suppose that such

coincidences are inevitable since there is no end to other imaginable

arrangements which would be fatal not only to life but to the very

structure of the universe as we know it.

Hoyle concludes that it takes a certain credulity to believe that such

coincidences are just so many inevitable accidents. According tohim,

life together with the whole universe dangles precariously from an

infinitesimal thread of improbability held by some sort of intelligence,

while beneath yawns a chasm of nearly infinite and fatal probabilities.

It is interesting that Hoyle is willing to go along with neo-Darwinism

in its rejection of the miracle of creation, yet he complains that the

model requires miracles of its own:

..as for instance the miracle of the formation of galaxies after the

big bang and the miricle of the origin of life in a feeble brew of

organic soup, which the credulous believe to have happened in the early

history of the earth (p. 237).

So what does Hoyle propose to put in the place of the less and less

plausible neo-Darwinian orthodoxy?

Briefly, skipping over many

interesting details of his argument, he suggests that cosmic dust

actually consists of the remains of countless bacteria which now

populate, and have populated for a long time, the whole universe. He

figures that life first originated elsewhere and was transported to

Earth, perhaps in the dust of some wide-ranging comet. But the

"life-seeds" (his term) brought to Earth, by whatever means, were not

accidents in the neo-Darwinian sense, they were sent by some prior, or

perhpas subsequent intelligence which is guiding, pushing and\or pulling

us into the future.

The reason for this ambivalence is that in Hoyle's

system tiem runs both forward and backward. He can't think of any

mathematical reason why time couldn't run both ways, so he assumes it

does.

Somehow the life-seeds got safely to Earth, having been sent out in all

directions by a previous and\or subsequent intelligence. He says,

somewhat enigmatically, "we are the intelligence that preceded us" (p.

239).

Afterward, neo-Darwinian evolution took over, but with a peculiar

twist. Hoyle belives that the billions and billions of mutations

necessary to the viral infections which modified the DNA of parent

organisms. These viruses, he calims, wre guided by some "cosmic

intelligence," which eventually gave rise to the great variety of

organisms that we see on Earth today.

Further, in some yet to be

imagained way, intelligent beings, perhaps much smarter than we are, but

not as smart as the infinite Judeo-Christian God (whom Hoyle discards)

planned the whole scenario.

Having demolished any hope for new-Darwinism, Hoyle alludes to his own

theory unflatteringly:

Although the thought may seem rahter fanciful, the surface of Mars

looks very much like a failed attempt at seeding from space, failed

"experiment" of a kind which eventually succeeded in the case of

earth (p. 105).

He says that "genes"...arrived on the Earth from the oustide" (p. 109),

but he acknowledges that his idea merely postpones consideration of the

life-problem:

An explanation of the amazing complexity of life must still

eventually be given, even in a cosmic theory (p. 109).

Really. And, by the way, if Hoyle's substitute for the discredited

neo-Darwinian othodoxy seems plausible, I've got an incredible bargain

for you on a used diesel import. Otherwise, in view of the fact that

evolution cannot occur, what is so unscientific about the creation

miracle?