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" 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.

Thank you so much for your reply!

The number five lottery example, like the number one, is another way of stating the anthropic principle. There's lots more on this at post 70. Here are two restatements of the anthropic principle (from that post):

Of course if our Universe was actually hostile to life, we couldn't be here to remark on the fact. This is the basis of the Anthropic Principle. To put it another way: without the right kind of physics you don't get physicists.

and...

Faced with such overwhelming improbability, cosmologists have offered up several possible explanations. The simplest is the so-called brute fact argument. "A person can just say: 'That's the way the numbers are. If they were not that way, we would not be here to wonder about it,' " says Rees. "Many scientists are satisfied with that." Typical of this breed is Theodore Drange, a professor of philosophy at the University of West Virginia, who claims it is nonsensical to get worked up about the idea that our life-friendly universe is "one of a kind." As Drange puts it, "Whatever combination of physical constants may exist, it would be one of a kind."

The other authors do not make the omissions you mention because they are not making an approximation; they delve into the subject in considerable detail. There are links at post 562 to Yockey, Rocha, Pattee. These are just introductory links to their work to get a "feel" for it. With a little help from Google, you can locate their books and publications.

The first link at 562, to the Origin-of-Life Prize, takes you to discussion page which provides the considerations in some detail for scientists making submissions.