I first posted this at Telic Thoughts, but since I link to it frequently when discussing ID at other blogs, I thought I would re-post it here.
On January 12th, 1982, Sir Fred Hoyle delivered the Omni Lecture
at the Royal Institution, London, entitled "Evolution from Space,"
which was later reprinted in a book by the same title, along with a
couple of other papers. In it he discussed the overwhelming
improbability of getting the enzymes needed for even the simplest form
of life to function by chance. "The odds…" he concluded were about the
same as throwing a "sequence of 50,000 sixes with unbiased dice." (p.10)
A few years earlier, Hoyle had come to the conclusion that life on
earth was the result of panspermia, and he goes on to present some of
his evidence in the lecture.
Then he returns to the problem of how life originated:
"Once we see that life is cosmic it is sensible to suppose that
intelligence is cosmic. Now problems of order, such as the sequences of
amino acids in the chains which constitute the enzymes and other
proteins, are precisely the problems that become easy once a directed
intelligence enters the picture, as was recognised long ago by James
Clerk Maxwell in his invention of what is known in physics as the
Maxwell demon. The difference between an intelligent ordering, whether
of words, fruit boxes, amino acids, or the Rubik cube, and merely random
shufflings can be fantastically large, even as large as a number that
would fill the whole volume of Shakespeare's plays with its zeros. So
if one proceeds directly and straightforwardly in this matter, without
being deflected by a fear of incurring the wrath of scientific opinion,
one arrives at the conclusion that biomaterials with their amazing
measure or order must be the outcome of intelligent design
[my emphasis]. No other possibility I have been able to think of in
pondering this issue over quite a long time seems to me to have anything
like as high a possibility of being true." (27-28)
Sir Hoyle then speculates as to why our kind of life was designed:
"My friend Willy Fowler and I discovered almost three decades ago
that the existence of carbonaceous life depends on the fine-tuning of
two so-called energy levels, one in the carbon nucleus, the other in the
oxygen nucleus. If either were shifted only minimally, the balance of
carbon and oxygen on which life depends, would be destroyed, for the
reason that carbon and oxygen would not then be synthesized in
appropriate proportions inside stars….My opinion has always been that
the fine-tuning…is an environmental property of physics which could be
different at other places and other times within the universe." (p.28)
He then goes on to suggest that just as one day the fine-tuning may
change, and we may have to design a different form of life, so
previously a different form of life had to design us. But unlike "the
God of Judaeo-Christian theology [who] is outside the Universe and is
said to be superiour to it…the intelligence responsible for the creation
of carbonaceous life in the present picture is within this universe and is subservient to it." (p.32)
Finally, Hoyle suggests that life was front-loaded for evolution:
"If at our present level of sophistication we were to attempt a new
material representation of ourselves, doubtless we would try for a
grandiose solution all in one shot, an explicit new creature complete in
itself, like the Greek story of Pygmalion, or like novices with a
computer who almost invariably get themselves into a tangle by
attempting to write a large complex program all in one go. The practised
expert on the other hand, builds a large complex computer program from
many sub-units, subroutines as they are called. Microorganisms and
genetic fragments are the subroutines of biology, existing throughout
space in prodigious numbers, riding everywhere on the light pressure of
the stars. Because the correct logical procedure is to build upwards
from precisely formed subroutines, we on the Earth had to evolve from a
seemingly elementary starting point." (p.34)
So here we have the atheist Fred Hoyle claiming that life was
intelligently designed, several years before the Intelligent Desgin
movement got off the ground. What's more, his lecture was cited in
several books that were influential in the ID movement: Bradley, Olson,
and Thaxton's Mystery of Life's Origins; Robert Shapiro's Origins;The Skeptic's Guide to the Creation of Life on Earth; and Michael Denton's Evolution: A Theory in Crisis.
It's difficult to believe that his views didn't have some influence on
the ID movement. But as far as I know, no one in the ID movement has
publicly credited him with much, if any influence. Still, I would guess
that there was a connection. My hunch is that it would have gone
something like this: After the defeat of the Creation Scientists in the
courtrooms, Phillip Johnson's more moderate group realized that
something less religious than Creationism was needed. Comparing their
views to Hoyle's, it was clear that even though they differed on who the
designer was, they agreed that life was intelligently designed. And
so the movement was born.
But regardless of how or even if Hoyle's views had any direct
influence on the ID movment, we can thank him for helping us to see that
there is a conceptual difference between the intelligent design of life
and creationism, and that the latter is a species of the former, not
the other way around.
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