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(continued)
Some scientists have postulated they may
be able to find some evidence for life originating from non-life on some
other planet. The reason for this is that it would give them
circumstantial evidence that life could originate by evolutionary
processes someplace else. (They have not found this evidence on Earth.)
For example, I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan in their book, Intelligent
Life in the Universe, have written: "…the discovery of life
on one other planet—e.g., Mars—can, in the words of the
American Physicist Philip Morrison, of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, ‘transform the origin of life from a miracle to a
statistic.’"35
Thus, Nobelist Francis Crick, (like Hoyle cited
earlier) thoroughly aware of the awesome complexity of cellular life,
and the extreme difficulty of explaining how such life could evolve in
the short time scientists now realize was available on earth for
evolution to take place, has advanced a theory he calls directed
panspermia. His theory, outlined in the book Life Itself,
advances the idea that an extraterrestrial civilization sent primitive
life-forms to earth in a spaceship. Because there was enormous time
required for interstellar travel, they sent primitive life capable of
surviving the voyage and the conditions they would meet upon arriving on
earth.
But this "solution" to the problem of
origins only seems to push the issue back a notch. How did the advanced
life that sent primitive life to our earth ever originate by chance
processes? In fact, research indicates this scenario cannot resolve the
problem. For example, in the October 1969 issue of Nature
magazine, Dr. Frank Salisbury of Utah State University, then on leave at
the Division of Biomedical and Environmental Research at the U.S. Atomic
Energy Commission, examined the chance of one of the most basic chemical
reactions for the continuation of life taking place. This reaction
involves the formation of a specific DNA molecule. (It is important to
realize that Dr. Salisbury was assuming that life already
existed. His calculations do not refer to the chance of the origin of
life from dead matter—as we have seen, something infinitely more
improbable—but to the continuance of life already existing.)
He calculated the chance of this molecule
evolving on 1020 hospitable planets (i.e., having favorable atmospheric
and biologic conditions). These one hundred, thousand, million, billion
planets constitute at least 1,000 times more hospitable planets than the
number many scientists have estimated could exist. Dr. Salisbury allows
4 billion years for the chance coming into existence of this molecule on
all these planets. But remember he is not speaking here of life
as we know it—developed, intelligent living beings, or even of one
single cell for that matter. He is only calculating the chance of this
one appropriate DNA molecule.
He concluded that the chances of just
this one tiny DNA molecule coming into existence over four billion
years, with conditions just right, on just one of these extremely large
number of hospitable planets, including the earth, as one chance in
10415.36 But this figure is also exceedingly beyond Borel’s law, which
says that beyond a certain point, improbable events never happen,
regardless of the time span involved. (Indeed, 1050 planets would pack
the known universe with planets [so that no space exists between them]
and yet the chances that life could evolve from dead matter on any one
of them are still beyond possibility.)37
Further, the problems associated with
human life evolving from microscopic forms are at least as difficult as
those of primitive life evolving from dead matter. Again, most
scientists assume that the great amounts of time involved will cause
highly improbable events to become virtually inevitable and thus solve
the problem. But even noted scientist A.I. Oparin concedes that,
"No serious quantitative arguments, however, are given in support
of such conclusions."38
All this may explain why many scientists who have
examined this theory critically consider the "directed panspermia"
hypothesis untenable, and do not feel it is a solution to the problems
we face. In Chance and Necessity, the outstanding French
biochemist and Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod makes his case all life
evolves by random means, yet he also says this:
When one ponders on the tremendous
journey of evolution over the past 3 billion years or so, the progenous
wealth of structures it has engendered, and the extraordinarily
effective teleonomic performances of living beings, from bacteria to
man, one may well find oneself beginning to doubt again whether all this
could conceivably be the product of an enormous lottery presided over by
natural selection, blindly picking the rare winners from among numbers
drawn at utter random…. [Nevertheless, although] the miracle stands
"explained"; it does not strike us as any less miraculous. As
Francois Mauriac wrote, "What this professor says is far more
incredible than what we poor Christians believe. This is true, just as
it is true that there is no achieving a satisfactory mental image of
certain abstractions in modern physics."39
Although Monod believes that life arose
by chance, he freely admits the chances of this happening before
it occurred were virtually zero.40 We can only be reminded of the
statement by another Nobel Prize winning biologist, George Wald of
Harvard University: "One only has to concede the magnitude of the
task to concede the possibility of the spontaneous generation of a
living organism is impossible. Yet here we are—as a result, I believe,
of spontaneous generation."41 Of course, Dr. Wald also thinks that
time solves all problems: "Time is, in fact, the hero of the plot….
One only has to wait: time itself performs the miracles."42
Nevertheless, what this boils down to is a personal choice—faith if
you will—to believe in what one freely admits is
"impossible"—rather than to believe in creation by
intelligent design. In considering all this, one is perhaps reminded of
the quip of Mark Twain in his Life on the Mississippi,
"There is something fascinating about science. One gets such
wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of
fact."
Nevertheless, Hoyle’s research partner,
Chandra Wickramasinghe, has appropriately noted that it is not only
creationism which relies on the supernatural. Evolution must also, since
the probabilities of random formation of life are conceded to be so
minuscule as to necessitate a miracle making belief in spontaneous
generation "tantamount to a theological argument."43
FOOTNOTES
35. I. S. Shklovskii and Carl Sagan, Intelligent
Life in the Universe (San Francisco: Holden-Day, 1966), p. 358.
36. Frank B. Salisbury, "Natural Selection
and the Complexity of the Gene," Nature, Vol. 224, 25
October 1969, pp. 342-343.
37. James Coppedge, Director, Center for
Probability Research in Biology, Northridge, California, personal
conversation, cf. Coppedge, Evolution: Possible or Impossible,
passim.
38. A. I. Oparin, Life: Its Nature, Origin and
Development (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1961), p. 31 from Wysong,
The Creation-Evolution Controversy, p. 139.
39. Jacques Monod, Chance and Necessity: An Essay
on the Natural Philosophy of Modern Biology (New York: Vintage,
1971), 138-139. Pierre-Paul Grasse comments, "Directed by
all-powerful selection, chance becomes a sort of providence, which,
under the cover of atheism, is not named but which is secretly
worshipped" (Grasse, p. 107).
40. Monod, ibid., pp. 138-139.
41. George Wald, "The Origin of Life,"
p. 9.
42. Ibid. p. 12.
43. Cited in Norman L. Geisler, Creator in the
Classroom - "Scopes 2": The 1981 Arkansas Creation-Evolution
Trial (Mieford, MI: Mott Media, 1982), p. 151.
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