Evolution from Space: A Theory of Cosmic Creationism

by Fred Hoyle, Chandra Wickramasinghe

Presents the revolutionary theory that mathematics can establish the probable existence of God and suggests that life began in space under the direction of a great intelligence.

Genres: Science, Evolution, Philosophy, Astronomy, Nonfiction, Space

192 pages, Paperback

Published January 12, 1984

About the author

Professor Sir Fred Hoyle was one of the most distinguished, creative, and controversial scientists of the twentieth century. He was a Fellow of St John’s College (1939-1972, Honorary Fellow 1973-2001), was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1957, held the Plumian Chair of Astronomy and Experimental Philosophy (1958-1972), established the Institute of Theoretical Astronomy in Cambridge (now part of the Institute of Astronomy), and (in 1972) received a knighthood for his services to astronomy.

Hoyle was a keen mountain climber, an avid player of chess, a science fiction writer, a populariser of science, and the man who coined the phrase 'The Big Bang'.

Reviews

[Manny · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have always been vehemently opposed to the teaching of Intelligent Design in schools. It seemed to me that the proposal was without value, since ID made no predictions and was the work of scientific illiterates who refused even to admit that their idea amounted to alien intelligences tampering with the DNA of living creatures on Earth over a period of billions of years. Since the mainstream ID movement has repeatedly been unmasked as a transparent cover for Creationism and the Religious Right, it was only too obvious why they were unwilling to concede on the question of the alien manipulators. I could see no reason to encourage them.

Well, I am not too proud to admit I was wrong. This book is admittedly insane, but I am not at all sure it would be a bad idea to use it as a school text. Fred Hoyle, one of the great scientists of the 20th century, is about as far from scientifically illiterate as it is possible to be. He makes clear predictions, and is more than happy to argue ID along the lines of manipulation from hyper-advanced alien societies. Done in the right way, I think that a bright group of 16 year olds who already knew a reasonable amount of science could get a great deal out of reading Evolution from Space and discussing it in class under the supervision of a well-prepared teacher. If any brave person wants to try this out, I hope you will let me know what happens.

Science should be about skepticism; Hoyle acts as an effective Devil's Advocate, asking reasonable questions about possible weaknesses in the Darwinian story and proposing imaginative alternatives. He starts by arguing that life could not have emerged as the result of random processes operating under selectional pressures, and goes on to suggest that it originally came from space in the form of simple microorganisms, and that gaps in the fossil record show genetic material has continued to arrive. As the book progresses, the hypotheses become more and more far-fetched. Towards the end, we learn that insects have come directly from the cosmos and may in reality be our planet's dominant group, with a hive intelligence greater than that possessed by humans; that the aliens have hidden coded messages for us in the genetic material of long-lived species like sequoias; and that there is a hierarchy of alien intelligences of increasing power and sophistication, in which the gene manipulators are lower ranked than the still more sophisticated agents who set up the basic laws of physics. When I was 16, I would have loved to talk about this stuff in science class, and I am sure we would all have learned a lot from trying to pin down exactly what was wrong with these brilliantly wacky ideas.

It would be nice to discover that Hoyle meant it all as a joke, along similar lines to Sladek's Arachne Rising: The Thirteenth Sign of the Zodiac; sad to tell, I think it's intended seriously. O, what a noble mind is here o'erthrown. But it's still a great read, and I finished it in a couple of days.

[notgettingenough]

Let's not forget, in the flush of enthusiasm for Manny's review of a book written by Hoyle, that it was written by two people, one of whom, though he may have started out an aspiring nobody paying due attention to Hoyle and receiving the possibly dubious benefits, became along the way a scientist of some regard.

Chandra Wickramasinghe was sacked from his post at Cardiff University last year, (http://www.lankaweb.com/news/items/20... ) only to find that he is increasingly becoming vindicated for the work he has done in this area.

Today a Guardian headline to warm the cockles of Bird Brian’s heart: Astrobiologist, Chandra Wickramasinghe suggests “NASA” has known for years life existed on Mars http://guardianlv.com/2012/10/astrobi...

The situation seems incredibly similar to the birth of what is now regarded as a science – cosmology – but was treated as an antiscience for a long time. Although there is now something called astrobiology, it is interesting to see that Hoyle and Wickramasinghe who as far as I can tell were the brave fighters for the idea in the first place have for now been expunged from the records, see wiki where there is not a word on either man in a detailed description of the field: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Astrobio...

Potentially, then, we are in one of those momentous historical periods which are only understood as such way later, when historians come in, clean up the mess and add an element of fairness to the whole business.

For the moment - however much of the details of this book turn out to be too elaborate - it is looking like the idea of it, which after all is the idea which has turned into astrobiology and which now cannot be denied as having validity as a field of research, makes it THE book, the one that will some time be the one historians talk of when they start ‘In the beginning there was…’

Amazing, is it not?

We NEED fighters, people who are determined to think in different ways, people who are not willing to toe the line and get their paychecks for doing what they are told. This is harder and harder for scientists to do, but here we see it happening, the dramatic climax, perhaps, to a struggle that began when Manny and I and I guess lots of others reading this were mere babes.

[K · Rating 2 out of 5]

Initially intriguing but ultimately dissatisfying. Hoyle substitutes an unnamed outer space biochemist for the biblical creator to fill in the gaps in our current scientific knowledge. He starts out plausibly enough, talking about the interstellar transportability of the building blocks of life but then devolves to explaining every gap (as of 1980) in the animal fossil record as targeted and timed mail drops of DNA from outer space. And this guy is a scientist? Give me a break.

[Steven H · Rating 5 out of 5]

IN THEIR THIRD BOOK, THE AUTHORS CONCLUDE THERE IS AN ‘INTELLIGENCE’

Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe wrote in the Introduction of this 1981 book, “While our escape in solar-system astronomy from blinkered medieval world is a reason for a certain measure of self -congratulation, we must be somewhat sparing in the adulations we heap upon ourselves, since almost exactly the same pre-Copernicus errors are being made nowadays in the frontier areas of astronomy, chemistry, and biology. There is the same passionate desire for Earth to be the center of life… Once again the issue is dominated more by sociology and religion than by science. More precisely, dominated by antireligion… The machines provided the answers to everyday problems… Not all problems, however, were of an everyday urgency. There was the problem of the origin of man himself… Things have become steadily more pre-Copernican as time has gone along… in the second half of the 20th century it became overwhelmingly clear that the truth is … Biochemical systems are exceedingly complex, so much so that the chance of their being formed through random shufflings of simple organic molecules is exceedingly minute, to a point where it is insensibly different from zero.” (Pg. 1-3)

They continue, “It became evident to naturalists in the 19th century… that if natural selection were to operate like artificial selection, only by emphasizing already-present characteristics, not much in the way of evolution would be achieved…. It was therefore necessary, if evolution was to be really important in the wild state, that genes should be able to change spontaneously in such a way that the genes of the offspring were not entirely determined by the genes of the parents… Just as even the most accurate electronic copier occasionally garbles a message, so a gene is occasionally garbled as it is copied from parent to offspring. Modern experiments have shown the garbling rate to be extremely slow, however, far too slow to provide variations that would be sufficient for natural selection to be much different from artificial selection.” (Pg. 5)

They note, “the variations on which natural selection operates arise from the miscopying of genetic messages. Miscopying commonly loses information and gains it only rarely. The variations on which natural selection operates are therefore strongly biased towards decline… Mathematics is needed to make further progress. Although the relevant mathematical results … are not particularly difficult to derive…, it is something of a mystery to understand why they were not obtained long ago. Possibly the reason was that the results are not particularly helpful to the Darwinian theory… It is all very well to argue that the informational standard is maintained by one’s competitors, but how did one’s competitors acquire their information in the first place?” (Pg. 7) “Possibly the reason was that the results are not particularly helpful to the Darwinian theory.” (Pg. 7)

They go on, “The problem for biology is to reach a simple beginning. Going back in time to the age of the oldest rocks… fossil residues of ancient life-forms discovered in the rocks do not reveal a simple beginning… Most of the biochemical complexity of life was present already at the time the oldest surface rocks of the Earth were formed. Thus we have no clue… as to how long the information standard of life was set up in the first place, and so the evolutionary theory lacks a proper foundation. As soon as we turn from a terrestrially limited theory to a cosmic point of view all the difficulties above are either overcome or are mitigated in some degree. The Earth becomes part of a vastly wider system, the universe itself, and it is the wider system which supplies the informational standard… Life had evolved already to a high information standard long before the Earth was born. We received life with the fundamental biochemical problems already solved.” (Pg. 8)

In the first chapter, they state, “There is a widespread apprehension that any weakening from a Darwinian position would open the flood-gates to new waves of irrationalism, and that the former victory would then be turned to defeat. The real defeat, however, would come from maintaining a wrong position (if it is wrong) for sociological reasons. Victory in science comes only from moving in the direction in which Nature points, no matter how unwelcome from a human point of view that direction may seem.” (Pg. 11) They outline, “we discuss three … curious cases, in which life-forms appear to possess properties that they have no right according to Darwinian theory to possess. We do this first for flies, secondly for peas and beans, and thirdly for bacteria. Darwinism makes few precise statements, and for this reason is it a hard theory to nail.” (Pg. 11)

They point out, “The crucial property of both myoglobin and hemoglobin… is almost unique… Thus biology appears to have ‘found’ all the possible arrangements of atoms, highly complex arrangements totaling the order of 10,000 atoms in the case of hemoglobin… It will be hard enough … to understand how animals with a decisive use for hemoglobin have been able to ‘find’ such an exceeding complex structure, but how could peas and beans have found it? In the 19th century and the first half of the present century, before the amazing complexity of such molecules was revealed by modern microbiology, it was possible for Darwinian theory to take refuge from this kind of question…. The smallness of the probability of an important new biomolecule like hemoglobin emerging in any one individual was admitted, but then was said to be overwhelmed by the enormous assembly of individuals to whom the improbable event might happen… Most scientists took the correctness of the Darwinism to be axiomatic, and they simply argued that any hypothesis needed to make Darwinism work had to be true.” (Pg. 14-15)

They continue, “Nowadays this situation is changed. The basic structures of the important biomolecules are mostly known and calculations of their being formed through shufflings of the constituent atoms can be made. It turns out that a successful shuffling is a vastly more unlikely business than looking for the tiniest needle in the largest haystack. So far from the number of legume plants which have existed on the Earth in the past being adequate to find hemoglobin, it looks as if hemoglobin could scarcely be found even if the whole universe consisted of peas and beans.” (Pg. 15)

They argue, “Man diverged from the gorilla about seven million years ago, and in that time only a single neutral mutation has appeared to make a difference between the a-globin chains of gorilla and man. If we take the average generation time of our human ancestors to have been twenty-five years, and the average generation time of gorillas to have been ten years, the sum of the number of human generations and gorilla generations that have occurred since the divergence seven million years ago is about one million. If the a-globin chain had only a single permitted neutral amino acid variation… the chance of a DNA copying error causing a change of any particular amino acid would be about one in a million per generation… This is a very slow rate. Yet it is only this very slow mutation rate that Darwinism has to work with. It is not only inadequate to explain the evolutionary changes that have occurred, sometimes over very short intervals for both plants and animals, it is woefully inadequate.” (Pg. 18-19)

They state, “Consider now the chance that a random ordering of the twenty different amino acids which make up the polypeptides it just happens that the different kinds fall into the order appropriate to a particular enzyme… By itself, this small possibility would be faced, because one must contemplate … a very large number of trials such are supposed to have occurred in an organic soup early in the history of the Earth. The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes, and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is … an outrageously small probability that could not be faced even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup. If one is not prejudiced either by social beliefs or by scientific training into the conviction that life originated on Earth, this simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court.” (Pg. 24)

They suggest, “Genes are to be regarded as cosmic. They arrive at Earth as DNA or RNA, either as full-fledged cells, or as viruses… or simply as separate fragments of genetic material. The genes are ready to function when they arrive… The problem for terrestrial biology is not therefore to originate the genes but to assemble them into whatever functioning biosystems the environment of the Earth will permit… The genes do not arrive at the Earth all in one moment during its early history… They arrive continuously, but not necessarily steadily… Nor do the genes arrive in a science-fiction vehicle… Comparatively small quantities of the genetic material are released continuously through the agency of comets in the manner discussed in two former books ‘Lifecloud’ and ‘Diseases from Space.’ … we now regard the comets only as possible amplifiers of the numbers of pre-existing cells and as storage refrigerators for them.” (P. 31-32)

They go on, “This picture does not… necessarily imply a purpose, but it will simplify the discussion … if we state our clear-cut view that there is indeed a purpose. The purpose is to generate life, not just on Earth, but everywhere that it will take root… Not by parading around the galaxy in a fleet of space ships, but through the genes traveling like seeds in the wind… Unlike the crew of a space ship the genes are potentially immortal.” (Pg. 32)

They point out, “Our views on biology have been treated in a curious way… our writings have been greeted with a wall of silence. The reason very likely is that every … biologist has seen from the beginning that sooner or later the word ‘purpose’ would appear, and to involve purpose in the eyes of biologists the ultimate scientific sin, worse even than to express doubt of the validity of Darwinism… The revulsion which biologists feel to the thought that purpose might have a place in the structure of biology is therefore revulsion to the concept that biology might have a connection to an intelligence higher than our own… Our postulate of a purpose in biology does not therefore seem to us to be the outrageous notion which it will probably appear to most biologists…” (Pg. 32-33)

In later chapters, they discuss Panspermia, life beyond Earth, problems with evolutionary theory, etc., before finally coming to ‘Convergence to God.’

They conclude, “We have received … warnings from friends and colleagues that our views on these matters are generally repugnant to the scientific world. We in our turn have been disturbed to discover how little attention is paid to fact and how much to myths and prejudice… We did not arrive all in a moment at the position described in this book… Only gradually did the overall picture at last become evident… life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the works of Shakespeare… We have argued that the requisite information came from an ‘intelligence,’ the beckoning spectre.” (Pg. 147-148, 150)

Fred Hoyle’s book, ‘The Intelligent Universe,’ concludes his journey, and resulted in his virtual excommunication from much of the mainstream scientific community.

[Kitap Yakıcı · Rating 3 out of 5]

When biologists began to see clearly that biological life-forms were not entirely separate from each other, as the original form of the special creation theory required, but that evolutionary connections existed between some of them, the impulse was to swing to the opposite extreme. The whole of the special creation theory was thought to be wrong and there was a general revulsion among scientists against it. In effect, when the details were seen to be incorrect, the fundamental idea that life was created by an intelligence was also rejected. (130)

Fascinating book by physicist and SF author argues that the building blocks of life did not evolve on Earth via the winnowing mechanisms of chance and necessity but were introduced, most likely in multiple waves, from outside the Earth. Hoyle and his co-author make the case that the amount of information represented in DNA and RNA statistically necessitates some form of intelligent engineering. Intelligent design of sorts, not by a supernatural agency outside space and time, but by some other form(s) of natural intelligence in the cosmos.

There are those who think that the way to establish a connection with a higher intelligence is to go riding around the galaxy in spaceships, or to listen for coded radio signals emanating from other planetary systems in the galaxy.... If our ideas are correct, there must surely be a multiplicity of clues around us here on the Earth's surface, clues to the identities of the intelligences immediately to the left of us in the sequence [i.e., -> "God" -> ???? -> ??? -> ?? -> ? -> "man"], probably as far as the intellect which calculated the properties of the enzymes. It would be more sensible, for example, to broadcast clues on the unexpressed DNA of yeast cells than to go to the ponderous technology of radio transmissions... (144)

I couldn't help but think of Terence McKenna and his Archaic Revival when I read the preceding quotation. Especially since the humble yeast is a fungus.

Although our point of view is anti-Darwinian and is in a sense a return to the concept of special creation, it is not the old concept of special creation. If we define 'creation' to mean arrival at the Earth from outside, the unit of creation in our picture is the gene, not the working assembly of genes that we call a species. Which assemblies of genes survive and which do not is decided by the environment of the Earth. The potential of life is cosmic but its realization is terrestrial. (147)

A synthesis of sorts between Darwinian differential survival and Hoyle's panspermia?

[Mark Latowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well thought out fascinating premise. Appendix gives hard factual evidence for author's opinion. Deconstruction of the theory of natural selection and origin of the species is excellent. If any constructive critique is warranted, the lines of logical argument even for savvy scientific minds get overly comple, and perhaps do not add that much value. The authors no doubt have brilliant minds and are very knowledgeable in their respective fields of study. It will be intereting to follow up and see what further evidence time brings.