"Not only is there no avoidance of the subject and quite a bit of recent scholarship, but in fact an entire discipline within biology known as Exobiology, which originated with an experiment of Dr. Stanley L. Miller in 1953 that demonstrated that amino acids, the basic building blocks of organic chemistry, could be synthesized from non-organic compounds, has continued to grow."I do understand Miller's experiment caused a buzz and encouraged the scientific community back then, but haven't such "discoveries" only led to today's subsequent appreciation of the immense complexities in explaining the the origin of life?
Since Stanley's suuposed "breakthrough," and despite all the ongoing NASA studies, university studies, and various institutes since, any and all theories and hypotheses haven't come close to moving much further than synthesizing that original batch of amino acids (Dr. Ferris' experiment notwithstanding).
" You can hold Hoyle's work out as a legitimate scientific opinion and it can be argued that it is valid, but his was clearly a minority viewpoint within the scientific community during his own day and at present. And I will also point out that many Creationist web sites who use Hoyle to try to discount the theories about the Big Bang and the origins of life on earth ignore him when it comes time to discuss subjects like Geologic Time and the age of the earth."
True -- Hoyle may be all over the place, AND Creationists may "borrow" his expertise when the argument serves them, however like many other scientists lately, Hoyle is said to have been disturbed or confused by his peers' willingness to adhere either to unproven or impossible scientific dogma, acknowledges why this might be the case: "Most scientists still cling to Darwinism because of its grip on the educational system...You either have to believe the concepts or...be branded a heretic."
On the scientific explanations for the origins of life on earth, it is true that the complexities are immense, which is what I take from the variety of scholarship upon it.
Now back to Hoyle. I submit that Hoyle's real conflict with "Dawinian orthodoxy" is with it material explanation for the origin of life on earth. You might want to examine a web page containing
an interview with Fred Hoyle in . I quote in the following excerpt, though I have underlined a specific portion of the text I consider relevant to a discussion of Hoyle's attitudes to the Theory of Evolution:
"
. . .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 neo-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 life from space, a 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 this 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)."
Now I'm going to venture a guess that you don't agree with Hoyle's take on things as described above. Neither do I, though I disagree for different reasons than you I am guessing.
And by the way, I actually have problems with the "primordial soup" hypothesis for the origins of life on earth myself. I tried to find something by the famous astronomer Shoemaker who suggested "cosmic fertilization by meteors or meteorites" but I couldn't locate it.