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Thank you so much for your post and for the link!

As you requested, here are links to various Clinton administration death information on the Downside Legacy:

The Remembering the Dead Section
Ron Brown
Carlos Ghigliotti
The *Body Count* Research Project
I think most of the information you are seeking is in the last link.

On the link you provided, the author offered basically four rebuttals to Hoyle’s approximation which I paraphrase as follows:

(1) the anthropic principle
(2) that it assumes independence of variables
(3) that it assumes independence of trials
(4) absence of information

The first and fourth are heavily influenced by worldviews. It is as dismissive to appeal to the anthropic principle as it is to say that God did it, and to many of us the absence of evidence is evidence of absence – to others that is not the case. IOW, I suggest that the first and fourth rebuttals are not a matter of right/wrong but personal worldview.

If what Hoyle offered were any more than an approximation I would be concerned about points 2 and 3. Nevertheless, others who approached the same problem – Yockey, Rocha, Wolfram etc. - all seem to narrow in on the same issues – in particular that since the universe had a beginning, the amount of time available for abiogenesis anywhere is not infinite.

It appears the most popular mechanism to explain it is the theory of autonomous biological self organizating complexity.

That theory however comes with a price for the atheist because it means evolution is not a directionless walk. Moreover, a bootstrap for such a process in an RNA world requires toggling between states which are stable to carry information, and not to be reactive (Rocha).

" If what Hoyle offered were any more than an approximation I would be concerned about points 2 and 3. Nevertheless, others who approached the same problem – Yockey, Rocha, Wolfram etc. - all seem to narrow in on the same issues "

I don’t see how producing precise results is a defense for removing the complexity and ambiguity from calculations. It’s been a long time since Chem 101, but I think molecules and amino acids do interact, and to remove that would be like removing the interaction of people from an equation as saying that Free Republic could not have been built by just one person in his short life span, born ignorant of everything.

I haven’t read the other authors, but if they make the same omission…

I’m not familiar with #1 the “anthropic principle”, but I don’t think that #4 the “absence of information” is dependent on world view. If we are evaluating the probability of biogenesis, we don’t begin with theological premises. The absence of information is very real.

Also there was a #5 reference to the problem of “calculating the probability of a predetermined outcome”. The author used the lottery example. Maybe the odds were 15 million to one that a specific creature would have been produced randomly, just like the odds are 15 million to one that a specific individual would win the lottery. But someone always wins.