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Editor's Introduction To:
Finger Trouble

Edward P. Hughes

Everyone knows how we came to be. There was a primordial Big Bang that created the Universe from nothing. This made a lot of hydrogen and helium, which sort of clumped into stars, which cooked new higher elements and eventually exploded. New stars formed, and planets; and on some of those planets there was a kind of organic soup, and—

There was a cartoon once. Three white-coated scientists looked at a blackboard covered with equations. Step by step the equations proceeded, until, in about the middle, were written the words: "And then a miracle occurs." The equations continued. The caption was, "Now, Dr. Hanscomb, about that eighteenth step . . ."

After life swam out of the organic soup we had Darwinian evolution. Everyone knows what that is. And of course it must be correct; after all, our schools are now required to teach it.

Sir Fred Hoyle, who knows a little about the origins of the universe, has some harsh words for all this. For example:

". . . nothing remains except a tactic that ill befits a grand master but which was widely used by staunch club players, namely to blow thick black pipe tobacco smoke in our faces. The tactic is to argue that although the chance of arriving at the biochemical system of life as we know it [through random action] is utterly minuscule, there is in Nature such an enormous number of other chemical systems which could also support life that any old planet like Earth would inevitably arrive sooner or later at one or another of them.

"This argument is the veriest nonsense."

In their work Evolution From Space Sir Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe argue that life throughout the universe has arisen by design. They don't deny that most life on Earth, including human beings, evolved from simple forms that first appeared on the planet some millions of years ago; but they claim that the evolution was directed. Darwin was simply wrong.

This isn't as new an hypothesis as you might think. After all, most of us were taught in high school biology the cellular theory: "Omnia cellula e cellula," said Schleiden and Schwann. All cells come from other cells. There is no spontaneous generation of life. This was accepted well into this century. Arrhenius, Nobel Prize winner for chemistry in 1903, argued that life pervades the universe, and is carried across it in spore form. Life was no more spontaneously generated in Earth's primordial organic soup than is the serpent of Egypt born in the mud "by the action of the Sun." Thus believed Pasteur; thus believed everyone. Except they didn't.

Hoyle and Wickramasinghe: "Yet by a remarkable piece of mental gymnastics biologists were still happy to believe that life started on Earth through spontaneous processes. Each generation was considered to be preceded by a previous generation, but only so far back in time. Somewhere along the chain was a beginning, and the beginning was a spontaneous process.

"Most but not all. Even in the nineteenth century there were a few scientists who felt the situation to be contradictory. If spontaneous generation could not happen, as Louis Pasteur had claimed to the French Academy, then it could not happen. Every generation of every living creature had to be derived from a previous generation, going backward in time to a stage before the Earth itself existed. Hence it followed that life must have come to the Earth from outside."

And indeed, according to Hoyle and Wickramasinghe, that is exactly what happened. Not only that: although there is a chance element in evolution, we continue to receive new genetic material from space to this very day. There is Evolution From Space, and it is not yet completed.

Their conclusion is remarkable: there is only one chance in ten to the fortieth—ten followed by forty zeroes—that life arose spontaneously by chance.

After all: if you put all the parts of a watch into a barrel, you can shake the barrel until doomsday and the parts will not fall together into a watch. If you find a watch in the woods, does that not imply a watchmaker? And if you find a watchmaker?

It simply isn't true that if forty million monkeys sat at typewriters they would eventually produce all the works in the British Museum. If every molecule in the universe were a monkey complete with typewriter; if those monkeys had all begun typing at the moment of the Big Bang, and each monkey had produced one English character each second—the chances are no more than one in ten to the twentieth that among them they would have produced one of Shakespeare's plays.

But of course. Shakespeare produced Shakespeare's plays.

Precisely. And how probable was Shakespeare?

 

We need not settle this here, which is as well, because we're not going to. My point is that evolution could proceed from design. Of course we already know that: we're already doing gene splicing and other experiments with DNA. Add to that some of the discoveries we've made about electric eels and think how we might improve upon them; stir together into a mixture containing old and new civilizations; recall that many people know little about their own history; and you have the ingredients for a whacking good story. Edward Hughes has done just that.

 

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