
    Hoyle and Wickramasinghe:  "...life cannot have had a random
beginning...The trouble is that there are about two thousand enzymes,
and the chance of obtaining them all in a random trial is only one part
in 10 to the 40,000th power, 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 a scientific
training into the conviction that life originated on the Earth, this
simple calculation wipes the idea entirely out of court....The enourmous
information content of even the simplest living systems...cannot in our
view be generated by what are often called "natural" processes....For
life to have originated on the Earth it would be necessary that quite
explicit instruction should have been provided for its assembly....There
is no way in which we can expect to avoid the need for information, no
way in which we can simply get by with a bigger and better organic soup,
as we ourselves hoped might be possible a year or two ago."
 Fred Hoyle and N. Chandra Wickramasinghe, Evolution from Space (Aldine
House, 33 Welbeck Street, London W1, 8LX: J.M. Dent & Sons, 1981), p.
148, 24,150, 30, 31)

    -----------------------------------------
  10 to the 18th power seconds = 31.7 billion years, assuming 31,536,000
seconds per year.  Even if an awesome 1000,trillion random combinations
could be tried every second each year for 30 billion years (ie 1 times
10 to the 33th power trials), the remaining odds would still be an
enormous 1 times 10 to the 39,967th power to 1 against the formation
of the necessary genes, based on Hoyle's 1 times 10 to the 40th power
figure.
   -------------------------------------------

   "The notion that not only the biopolymers, but the operating
programme of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial
soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order...Quite a
few of my astronomical friends are considerable mathematicians, and once
they become interested enough to calculate for themselves, instead of
relying of hearsay argument, they can quickly see the point."
  Fred Hoyle, The Big Bang in Astronomy,  New Scientist, Vol 92, No 1280
(November 19, 1981), p. 527.




