Vylo

This is taken from a book called Life Itself, and someone is using it to back up claims against evolution. However, it is written by a man who believes in evolution as far as I can see. Are they withdrawing information and taking this out of context?

RRoman

Disproving Abiogenesis does not disprove evolution, as these are two different things.


And we can conclude this because we know the conditions of every other planet in the unviverse, and none of them have the right conditions


dichtonomy. The beginnings of life could have been the products of chemical reactions.


(Edit: Perhaps this thread would be better off in the Evo/Cre forum.)

wade-w

I agree.

Jack the Bodiless

I note that Crick's book was published more than twenty years ago. Much progress on the "RNA world" has been made since then.

And Hoyle, of course, was a maverick who regularly ignored scientific evidence that contradicted his fixed beliefs. Hence his rejection of the Big Bang theory.

Oolon Colluphid

Not to mention his and Wickramsingh's 'Archaeopteryx is a forgery' claims... Like, all eight of them? Like, how do you add feather imprints to a fossil so that the imprints pass under the bones?

Not to mention his coining of 'tornado in a junkyard' as a refutation of evolution.

Hmmm. Hoyle.

Rhaedas

Most likely, it's a common technique. Ironic, since the out of context argument is often used against biblical skeptics.

As has been touched on, the argument of taking current sequences to claim impossible odds is an invalid one, as early life would have been much simpler in form.

This definitely sounds like text mining to me.

Hoyle should have known better than to ever make that airplane from a junkyard quote....what a terrible analogy. Even more terrible is that it's still used these days to claim abiogenesis impossible.

And the "primeval soup" image that has been around a while may indeed be wrong...I've read of various models of jumpstarting life production, from using clay and crystal structures to lay upon, to sludges and soups.

Albion

Yes. The quote on p. 51 comes from a passage where he's talking about selecting a particular amino acid sequence by chance. All the stuff you quoted is intended to show how difficult it would be for this to happen by chance. He then explains that it didn't happen by chance:

"What we have discovered is that even at this very basic level there are complex structures which occur in many identical copies - that is, which have organized complexity - and which cannot have arisen by pure chance. Life, from this point of view, is an infinitely rare event, yet we see it teeming all around us. How can such rare things be so common?

"Stripped of its many fascinating complexities, the basic mechanism is very simple. It was suggested by both Darwin and Wallace, each of whom conceived the idea after reading Malthus. Living organisms must necessarily compete, for food, for mates and for living space, especially with other members of their own species. They must avoid predators and other dangers. For all these various reasons, some will leave more offspring than others, and it is the genetic characteristics of such preferred replicators wich will be passed on preferentially to succeeding generations. In more technical terms, if a gene confers increased "fitness" on its possessor, then such a gene is more likely to be found in the gene pool of the next generation. This is the essence of natural selection."

In other words, he's setting up the "impossible to occur by chance" scenario as a background to argue specifically for, not against, evolution - as the person who extracted the original quote would have known very well.

Here's your second quote in context:

“An honest man, armed with all the knowledge available to us now, could only state that in some sense, the origin of life appears at the moment to be almost a miracle, so many are the conditions which would have had to have been satisfied to get it going. But this should not be taken to imply that there are good reasons to believe that it could not have started on the earth by a perfectly reasonable sequence of fairly ordinary chemical reactions. The plain fact is that the time available was too long, the many microenvironments on the earth's surface too diverse, the various chemical possibilities too numerous and our own knowledge and imaginatioon too feeble to allow us to be able to unravel exactly how it might or might not have happened such a long time ago, espcially as we have no experimental evidence from that era to check our ideas against. Perhaps in the future we may know enough to make a considered guess, but at the present time we can only say that we cannot decide whether the origin of life on earth was an extremely unlikely event or almost a certainty - or any possibility between these two extremes. If it was highly likely, there is no problem. But if it turns out that it was rather unlikely, then we are compelled to consider whether it might have arisen in other places in the universe where possibly, for one reason or another, conditions were more favorable."

Well, he makes very clear the difference between accidental formation and chemical reactions followed by evolution. The person extracting those quotes has very carefully chosen them so that the difference is eliminated and hence Profesor Crick appears to be arguing a postion opposite to the one he's actually arguing. Typical creationist tactics.

DMB

And Crick is a distinguished biologist, whereas Hoyle was a distinguished physicist/cosmologist who, while wrong on his steady state theory, did a great deal of useful work about the development of stars. So he wasn't an expert on biology or biochemistry.