a one in a trillion chance…
How to lie with statistics, creationist style.
Hey, did you know that the probability of life evolving at random is1040,000 to 1 as calculated by the late astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle? Take that evolutionists! Your theory has been disproven once and for all and we now know for a fact that life was made by an intelligent designer (just one, don't ask why, you don't need to know). It's all math and science. So how does it feel to get beaten at your own game, huh? Try and argue your way out of that one. No, seriously, just try and prove Hoyle's calculations wrong.
Ok, I'm putting away the creationist alter ego, sorry to scare you like that. Just wanted to give you a sense of the joy and excitement that runs through a creationist's mind when he finds a new argument that looks somewhat scientific and could be used as a battering ram against the hated theory of evolution. Never mind that it's a totally arbitrary one or that it's based on what amounts to a very creative interpretation of the theory.
The reality is that using Hoyle's strange calculation to prove the impossibility of a random origin of life is like parading a solution to the Drake equation as proof that intelligent alien empires are swarming across the galaxy. But hey, for at least a little while, creationists get to feel on top of the world, thinking they've just dealt a fatal blow to the theory of evolution.
The first major problem with Hoyle's statistics is the vagueness of the terms he used. What was his definition of life? What kind of life did he use in his calculations? Did he account for an alien life form that could use silicone instead of carbon? Did he make provisions for organisms that could use arsenic instead of phosphorous? And did he account for solvents other than water?
There's also the question of what can be considered a living organism. While Hoyle supposedly calculated the probability of self replicating cells arising from random atoms, he totally ignores viruses which are living but not self-replicating organisms, relying on a host to reproduce and spread. Unless you've found every living thing in the universe and cataloged them from inside out, how can you claim that you're able to predict the likelihood of life arising by chance? You don't have a complete data set.
Secondly, calculating the possibility of random atoms aligning to make a living cell ignores the basic principles of chemistry. Atoms don't just randomly align into molecules, they react with other atoms based on certain rules. Again, that's something that doesn't seem to be part of the formula. So we're calculating the probability of life while forgetting all about its chemistry? How is our calculation anything other than an arbitrary guess? And what about environments which could be either conductive or hostile to life? This is yet another glaring omission.
One more problem comes to mind as well. Since when did evolution have anything to do with the origin of life? It's nothing more a strawman. Using evolution to describe the origin of life is like using gravity to describe the origins of matter. Try and use a theory that isn't meant to tell you how life began to explain the origins of life and you're guaranteed to come up empty. Well, if you can't discredit the theory of evolution using genes or quotes from random people who talk about how complex life and the universe are, change the definition of the theory and try to jam a fork in its eye.
Finally, let's remember that Hoyle was an astronomer. He was one of the first scientists to start thinking about panspermia and comet impacts bringing ingredients for life to planets that can one day become great habitats for whatever will evolve. Both of those ideas are certainly worthy and are still being investigated today. But when he was trying to calculate what life is and what are the odds of it forming from random atoms, he was speaking completely out of his depth.
I mentioned earlier how scientists quoted by creationists almost always work in fields unrelated to biology or evolutionary theory. Unfortunately, Sir Hoyle is one more case and if we consider how much he left out and how much we still have left to learn about the origins of life, which is a completely different theory than evolution, his formula is just a wild guess, thinly veiled as a scientific calculation.
