[churchillbuff]

"anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with the Rubik cube will concede the near-impossibility of a solution being obtained by a blind person moving the cubic faces at random. Now imagine 1050 blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling at just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only biopolymers but the operating programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order"

Hoyle, Fred (1981a), “The Big Bang in Astronomy,” New Scientist, 92:527, Nov. 19.

[OmahaFields]

“The Big Bang in Astronomy,”

I think his arguments against the BB were refuted and dimissed decades ago.

[OmahaFields]

...here on the Earth ..."

The rest of the story. Hoyle believed that our origins came from viruses carried on comets that 'initiated' the events that allowed 'man to arise from the soup'.

[OmahaFields]

Hmmm. Crick believed we evolved on earth, Hoyle believed that the seeds of life on earth came on comets.

"For example, Sir Francis Crick, co-discoverer of DNA, contended that biological life evolved here on earth. On the other hand, Sir Fred Hoyle has argued that “spontaneous generation” occurred in outer space!"

[b_sharp]

"You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling at just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends."

The biopolymers Hoyle speaks about are not formed by random shuffling. They are formed by the aggregate build up of monomers which are in turn so easily formed that many have been found in space. The first self-replicator which did not have to be what we consider life need not be anywhere near as complex as modern RNA let alone DNA.

Note that I am not saying that we know how life got started, we do not. We have some promising work underway but the evidence for abiogenesis is so far minor and somewhat unconvincing. What I am saying is that Hoyle's opinion on Abiogenesis is ill founded, poorly considered, misleading and overall meaningless.