[PatrickHenry]

But the blindfold is key. [To blowing away :He (Hoyle) calculated similar odds that even one protein formed on Earth through blind chance.]

The key to that one -- the ever-popular "random atoms blindly flying together by accident" strawman -- is the creationoid's unstated premise that all atoms behave like a Teflon^tm-coated ball-bearings, so that none will naturally form a huge variety of sub-components that are abundant and readily available for combining into ever-more-complicated organic molecules.

I could go on. I realized I've skipped a bunch. After five years of sifting through the creation/ID arguments, I don't know any good ones.

They're mostly all here, and all refuted: An Index to Creationist Claims. From Talk.Origins.

[longshadow]

"For whom the bell trolls; it trolls for thee." placemarker

[VadeRetro]

I had my head still going on mutations in existing life versus abiogenesis. My bad.

Hoyle's model is a good argument against creationism, a proof that even God wouldn't make a cell in one afternoon from dirt. In assuming that a protein has to poof together from component aminos all at once, he is using the most creationist possible model. Wouldn't two aminos forming a stable or semi-stable dimer be a more realistic assumption?

Evolutionary thinking about nearly anything does not involve huge shazams from lots of tiny simple things into one big complicated thing. They do tend to involve features no "evolutionary modeler" from Hoyle onward pays the slightest attention to:

• Bootstrapping from similar but simpler prototypes,
• Massive parallelism of experiment,
• Slow accumulation of features,
• Lots of time.