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|                     "Vital Articles on Science/Creation"                   |
|____________________________________________________________________________|
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|   Institute for Creation Research    |~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~|    |
|   10946 Woodside Ave N               |   December 1984    No. 138     |    |
|   Santee, CA  92071                  |________________________________|    |
|   (619) 448-0900  Voice                                                    |
|   (619) 448-3469  FAX                 * Copyright (c) 1984 by I.C.R. *     |
|____________________________________________________________________________|

                            NOT ACCORDING TO HOYLE

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

* Dr. Oller is Professor of Linguistics at the University of New Mexico.

          No, not poker, and not Edmond Hoyle (1672-1769), the famed
  authority on card games and chess.  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, even
  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 the prior formation of about 2,000
  enzymes, themselves also complex proteins, which are critical to the
  successful formation of all the other 198,000 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 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 not easily be persuaded by the
  argument against the junkyard mentality.  They may be inclined to
  believe that the analogy of a 747 is quite uninteresting 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 to the life-problem and that the one
  which occurred on Earth was as inevitable as the shape of a totally
  unique snowflake.  But Hoyle has anticipated their rebuttal and rejects
  it.  He contends that in the universe as we know it there are
  uncountable "anthropic" coincidences--intelligent accidents.  For
  instance, he cites 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 biochemicals 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 of 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
  to him, 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 miracle 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
  perhaps subsequent intelligence which is guiding, pushing and/or
  pulling, us into the future. The reason for this ambivalence is that in
  Hoyle's system time 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 believes that the billions and billions of
  mutations necessary to the impossibly rapid ascent of protozoans to man
  were brought about by viral infections which modified the DNA of parent
  organisms.  These viruses, he claims, were guided by some "cosmic
  intelligence," which eventually thus gave rise to the great variety of
  organisms that we see on Earth today.  Further, in some yet-to-be
  imagined 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 rather 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 the Earth (p. 105).

  He says that "genes"...arrived on the Earth from the outside" (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 orthodoxy 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?

                        ***************************

   This article was proofread and corrected (from a scanned article) by:


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