Customer Reviews

Evolution from Space

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Astronomer and maverick Fred Hoyle is once reported to have said, 'Space isn't remote at all. ... It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.' Hoyle was a world-renowned astronomer, and a very creative scientist who didn't let convention or popular opinion sway his views. He is often credited with coining the term 'Big Bang', a bit ironic, given that he used this term in a bit of scorn -- he never accepted the Big Bang theory of universal creation and evolution, preferring a Steady State Theory, never fully developed, as the astronomical community as a whole was far more interested in the Big Bang theory.

Hoyle's first claim to fame came from his work in stellar evolution and structure. He developed the theories of chemical element formation in the stars, commonly accepted by scientists today. Whenever you hear an astronomer or another waxing philosophic that we are all made of stardust or star-stuff, you are hearing an echo of Hoyle. While he did not win the Nobel Prize (many scientists think that he should have for this stellar work, no pun intended), he did with the Crafoord Prize, an award given by the Swedish Academy in recognition for fields not covered by Nobel Prizes.

In collaboration with Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle was a champion of the modern theory of panspermia. Panspermia is essentially the theory that life comes from off the earth -- it has developed into a theory entitled 'Cosmic Ancestry' now, and includes many more environmental ideas. It argues that the Earth is not a biologically closed ecosystem -- apart from the fact that human-made spacecraft have propelled genetical material beyond the earth notwithstanding, Panspermia and such theories argue that the universe has, indeed, may be full of spores and other types of genetic 'pieces', viruses and the like, that occasionally find their way to earth, and rarely but occasionally survive the entry and become grafted onto the genetic structures on Earth.

This text with Wickramasinghe covers the range of ideas, including early theories from the late nineteenth century. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also argue for an Anthropic Principle of Cosmology here -- that there is a purpose to the universe, and that human beings have a special place. Hoyle asks the question, why should we not believe there is a guiding principle in biology by intelligences beyond our own? Why is it that people are accepting of a God-principle, but not of intelligences that might fall between God and our own? These are rather dramatic and controversial ideas, to say the least. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe argue for a scientific pantheism, with God as the universe.

Hoyle's ideas are interesting, and backed up with impressive science (chemistry, physics, and biology). However, it is still very cutting-edge and beyond the mainstream thinking -- Hoyle prods the more Darwinian theories for evidence, while accepting that there is in fact no more evidence for Panspermia.

An interesting text for the edge of science. This is not what I believe, either scientifically nor as a theologian, but it is fascinating to see how such ideas are developed.

Sir Fred Hoyle was a master of the bold hypothesis. His record of success, although of course not perfect, ...and indeed mostly wrong, was actually quite extraordinary, both in terms of it's occasional successes and in it's scientifically grounded imagination. In truth very few hypotheses ever yield bullseyes and the bolder they are the worse they score. Yet nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Carl Sagan once said "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere." Hoyle's hypotheses may often be wrong but they play a role in moving science forward.

This book is one of Hoyle's most controversial as in it he cheekily aimed to tweak the nose of biology. Within Hoyle made various rhetorical stabs at evolutionary darwinism. And, coming as they did during the hurdy gurdy years of the 'culture wars' over neo-creationism, before it mutated into 'intelligent design', Hoyle's bad (or was it deliberate?) timing earned him some ire from fellow scientists.

Hoyle's critique of Darwinism, sometimes quoted in nieve ignorance by creationists as a supporting witness, was however more bluster than buckshot. Despite some harsh words for mainstream neo-Darwinism, he never endorsed Creationism and his alternate theories were indeed very much based on mainstream Darwinian mechanisms. Admittedly with a large dose of extra-terrestial retrovirus invasion thrown in to shake up the mix. Retrovirus infection and it's proposed extra-terrestial origins are the two planks of his hypothesis.

Indeed in his emphasis on the role of retrovirus and other micro-organism infection of the genome, in short postulating a major loophole to "the central dogma of micro-biology" (central dogma was a term coined by the DNA pioneers themselves) Hoyle may indeed have been (again) ahead of his time. When he wrote little empirical work on the extent of this kind of microscopic hitch hiking had actually been done. Things are different today. Here is a quote from a recent issue of 'The New Yorker'.

"When the sequence of the human genome was fully mapped, in 2003, researchers also discovered something they had not anticipated: our bodies are littered with the shards of such retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. It takes less than two per cent of our genome to create all the proteins necessary for us to live. Eight per cent, however, is composed of broken and disabled retroviruses, which, millions of years ago, managed to embed themselves in the DNA of our ancestors. They are called endogenous retroviruses, because once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species."

I doubt whether even Hoyle imagined the figure to have been as high as 8%. So 'plank number two' has survived the years perhaps better than Hoyle's contemporaneous critics may have ever imagined.

What about 'plank number one'? Well this is still unproven. But in November, 1969, terrestial microorganisms that accidentally infected the Surveyor 3 spacecraft before launch were recovered from inside the probe's camera and returned alive and well to their home planet, after three years on the moon, by Apollo 12. We have still to discover indigenous micro-organisms on Mars, but the Mars meteorites found in Antarctica, indicate that the search for extra-terrestial life has taken a distinctly Hoylean turn, even if the search still remains unfulfilled. So Hoyle's plank number two is still unproven but it definitely ain't dead yet.

Hoyle probably won't have the last laugh, but the odds seem to have turned somewhat in his favour.

Fred Hoyle (1915-2001) was an English astronomer noted primarily for his contribution to the theory of stellar nucleosynthesis and cosmology; he also coined the term "Big Bang" (as a sarcastic comment, in contrast to his own "Steady-State" theory). This 1981 book continues the collaboration between Hoyle and Wickramasinghe (that began with Lifecloud: Origin of Life in the Universe, Diseases from Space, as well as Wickramasinghe's own Journey With Fred Hoyle: The Search For Cosmic Life).

In the Introduction to this book, the authors state that A.I. Oparin's work (see his The Origin of Life) "was widely acclaimed as putting the final nail in the coffin of the older religions. All of life (and death) could be seen, it was claimed, to spring from natural causes. With the development of microbiology in the second half of the twentieth century it became overwhelmingly clear that the truth is quite otherwise. Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point where it is insensibly different from zero." (pg. 2-3)

They criticize the Darwinian theory of evolution; ultimately, they arrive at a belief in a Creator.

However, they give a nuanced interpretation of this in the Conclusion, which states, "Although our point of view is anti-Darwinian and is in a sense a return to the concept of special creation, it is not the old concept of special creation. If we define 'creation' to mean arrival at the Earth from outside, the unit of creation in our picture is the gene, not the working assembly of genes we call a species. Which assemblies of genes survive and which do not is decided by the environment of the Earth. The potential of life is cosmic but its realization is terrestrial.... From the beginning of this book we have emphasized the enormous information content of even the simplest living systems. The information in our view cannot be generated by what are often called 'natural' processes ... We have argued that the requisite information came from an 'intelligence,' the beckoning spectre."

Evolution From Space by Sir Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe is a ground-breaking work which surely serves to cast doubt on Darwinian evolution and cause biologists to look afresh at life's origins. Every chapter is full of surprises. Why do we find globin genes in legumes? Why are bacteria able to survive in conditions which are not found on Earth? And why do flies see at wavelengths of 2,537 Angstrom - a wavelength which does not exist naturally on Earth? The answer to this question is one of the biggest surprises in the book - insects come from outer space. The authors argue that there is simply no selective pressure for insects and microorganisms to evolve these adaptive properties on Earth, so an extraterrestrial environment for the selective pressure factors must logically be considered.
Hoyle and Wickramasinghe demonstrate the mathematical impossibility of amino acids in a single gene rearranging themselves to become functional within a Darwinain evolutionary timescale.
Their way of explaining the absence of intermediate species in the fossil record ( an awkward fact for Darwinian evolution which insists on a gradual process involving intermediate species ) is also quite novel. Evolution per saltum ( by a jump ) is caused by fresh inputs of cosmic genes which rain down on the Earth and which are acquired by species best able to use them.
Unlike so many scientists, Hoyle and Wickramasinghe do not dodge the fundamental question of the Universe ( and life in particular ) being controlled by some form of Intelligence - or God. In the final chapter, the authors postulate a theory which involves a sequence of Intelligences: one which "...designed the biochemicals and gave rise to the origin of carbonaceous life". Another higher level of Intelligence was responsible for controlling "...the coupling constants of physics." And how many of these Intelligences are there? "But like a convergent mathematical sequence of functions it has an idealised limit.....it is this idealised limit that is God...." And the authors' final conclusion is that God is the Universe.

Fred Hoyle's reputation in science is fairly mixed. On one hand, he solved an important astrophysics problem. Prior to his work, physicists couldn't explain the larger amounts of carbon and elements heavier than carbon (nitrogen, oxygen, etc) in the universe. Instead it seemed that fusion should not be possible beyond the formation of helium. Hoyle proposed a mechanism where three Helium nuclii fuse to form a carbon nucleus. This solved the problem and he is generally credited with that.

On the other hand, you have his opposition to big bang theory and, well, this book, which really ought to be seen as the founding of contemporary intelligent design theory. There's much more to this book than that, however, and it's worth reading in it's own right.

Hoyle makes three basic hypotheses:

1) Life came to earth from space
2) Genes from space carried in on viruses are constantly impacting the genetics of life on earth.
3) Life is so improbable that it must have been intelligently designed.

I think the third point is the least persuasive. At best one can argue that intelligent design is a superior theory to the theory that all enzymes were created through random shuffling of amino acid blocks. However the random shuffle theory has never been particularly scientifically accepted. Furthermore the Darwinist theory he was arguing against isn't even close to current evolutionary theory. Consequently I think one has to discount this theory, or at least suggest it's an argument against a straw man.

The evolutionary theory he argues against may have been current in the 1970's but it's not current today. He approaches evolution as a linear, progressive process instead of a complex, nonlinear, adaptive process. Claims that no evolutionary potential is left in mice is evidence of an idea that evolutionary potential is something inherent in the genome. Many of his complaints, from rapid speciation to a lack of transitional fossiles are based on this fundamental poor assumption. However, his survey of older pre-Darwin ideas is interesting in part because it allows for those who are interested in the history of ideas to see how in some areas, current thought has returned to ideas which were supposedly disproven by Darwin's hypothesis (for example, the idea that evolution speeds up when animals are under stress is one such pre-Darwinian idea that the field has returned to). I suppose it proves Heisenburg (Physics and Philosophy: The Revolution in Modern Science) right. Scientific theory is not implied by data but a combination of assumption and data.

At the same time, I think that his theories about genetic material coming from space may have some merit. Something like 8% of the human genome appears to be of viral origin, and more evidence is slowly surfacing interplanetary space is full of organic chemicals. Additionally it's become more and more clear that microbes can survive in outer space. It may not be as large of a change as he suggests but it may be a change nonetheless.

The main virtue of this work though is that despite the fact that the author was a reputable scientist, his critique essentially transformed the creationism capm in the culture wars into the intelligent design camp. It's interesting for this reason beyond any others.

This is not a book to be read uncritically. There's a lot wrong with it, but it's also an interesting and thought provoking read nonetheless, and hence I'd certainly recommend it.

Noone realizes it but this work is a classic on the issue of Darwinism. It has been 'refuted' so many times and still survives one must wonder if it doesn't scare Darwinists. One doesn't have to accept their perspective to see that the statistical difficulties of the original Darwinian theory were fatal, and should have been seen all along.
Attempts to deal with statistics in the Darwinian field have left a generation confused on the subject. The paradigm, to survive, has to keep the troops muddled.

Re: "Noone realizes it but this work is a classic on the issue of Darwinism. It has been 'refuted' so many times and still survives one must wonder if it doesn't scare Darwinists."

So does astrology survive. Guess what? Astrology doesn't "scare" astronomers. It is sad to see someone of Fred Hoyle's former stature reject the scientific method and embrace mysticism. ("No one" is spelled "no one", not "noone".)