Evolution from Space Paperback – January 12, 1984

Some really good early thinking here but you will need to be interested in this subject and have some basic understanding about it. It will stretch your mind and your thinking as far as what is possible...where did we come from? I approached this subject in the third part of my book To Believe Or Not To Believe: The Social and Neurological Consequences of Belief Systems

Rahasya Poe, Lotus Guide

THINK OUTSIDE THE BOX. NOT IN YOUR WRONG SCIENTIFIC MIND. COMFORM. LIFE IS A PARADOX. A PUZZLE. BEGIN WITH THE CORNER SQUARE, BEGIN WITH THIS BOOK.

A very interesting read.

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.

There is a good calculation of the improbability of naturalistic evolution, taking into account the large number of enzymes needed of minimal life functions. Hoyle's theories of life origins from space, however, are not convincing.

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."