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Review Summary: Flawed theorist ...or just ahead of his time? |
Date: 2007-12-09 |
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Details: Sir Fred Hoyle was a master of the bold hypothesis. His record of success, although of course not perfect, ...and indeed mostly wrong, was actually quite extraordinary, both in terms of it's occasional successes and in it's scientifically grounded imagination. In truth very few hypotheses ever yield bullseyes and the bolder they are the worse they score. Yet nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Carl Sagan once said "Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were. But without it we go nowhere." Hoyle's hypotheses may often be wrong but they play a role in moving science forward.
This book is one of Hoyle's most controversial as in it he cheekily aimed to tweak the nose of biology. Within Hoyle made various rhetorical stabs at evolutionary darwinism. And, coming as they did during the hurdy gurdy years of the 'culture wars' over neo-creationism, before it mutated into 'intelligent design', Hoyle's bad (or was it deliberate?) timing earned him some ire from fellow scientists.
Hoyle's critique of Darwinism, sometimes quoted in nieve ignorance by creationists as a supporting witness, was however more bluster than buckshot. Despite some harsh words for mainstream neo-Darwinism, he never endorsed Creationism and his alternate theories were indeed very much based on mainstream Darwinian mechanisms. Admittedly with a large dose of extra-terrestial retrovirus invasion thrown in to shake up the mix. Retrovirus infection and it's proposed extra-terrestial origins are the two planks of his hypothesis.
Indeed in his emphasis on the role of retrovirus and other micro-organism infection of the genome, in short postulating a major loophole to "the central dogma of micro-biology" (central dogma was a term coined by the DNA pioneers themselves) Hoyle may indeed have been (again) ahead of his time. When he wrote little empirical work on the extent of this kind of microscopic hitch hiking had actually been done. Things are different today. Here is a quote from a recent issue of 'The New Yorker'.
"When the sequence of the human genome was fully mapped, in 2003, researchers also discovered something they had not anticipated: our bodies are littered with the shards of such retroviruses, fragments of the chemical code from which all genetic material is made. It takes less than two per cent of our genome to create all the proteins necessary for us to live. Eight per cent, however, is composed of broken and disabled retroviruses, which, millions of years ago, managed to embed themselves in the DNA of our ancestors. They are called endogenous retroviruses, because once they infect the DNA of a species they become part of that species."
I doubt whether even Hoyle imagined the figure to have been as high as 8%. So 'plank number two' has survived the years perhaps better than Hoyle's contemporaneous critics may have ever imagined.
What about 'plank number one'? Well this is still unproven. But in November, 1969, terrestial microorganisms that accidentally infected the Surveyor 3 spacecraft before launch were recovered from inside the probe's camera and returned alive and well to their home planet, after three years on the moon, by Apollo 12. We have still to discover indigenous micro-organisms on Mars, but the Mars meteorites found in Antarctica, indicate that the search for extra-terrestial life has taken a distinctly Hoylean turn, even if the search still remains unfulfilled. So Hoyle's plank number two is still unproven but it definitely ain't dead yet.
Hoyle probably won't have the last laugh, but the odds seem to have turned somewhat in his favour. |
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Review Summary: Interesting fringe of science |
Date: 2004-07-31 |
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Details: Astronomer and maverick Fred Hoyle is once reported to have said, 'Space isn't remote at all. ... It's only an hour's drive away if your car could go straight upwards.' Hoyle was a world-renowned astronomer, and a very creative scientist who didn't let convention or popular opinion sway his views. He is often credited with coining the term 'Big Bang', a bit ironic, given that he used this term in a bit of scorn -- he never accepted the Big Bang theory of universal creation and evolution, preferring a Steady State Theory, never fully developed, as the astronomical community as a whole was far more interested in the Big Bang theory.
Hoyle's first claim to fame came from his work in stellar evolution and structure. He developed the theories of chemical element formation in the stars, commonly accepted by scientists today. Whenever you hear an astronomer or another waxing philosophic that we are all made of stardust or star-stuff, you are hearing an echo of Hoyle. While he did not win the Nobel Prize (many scientists think that he should have for this stellar work, no pun intended), he did with the Crafoord Prize, an award given by the Swedish Academy in recognition for fields not covered by Nobel Prizes.
In collaboration with Chandra Wickramasinghe, Hoyle was a champion of the modern theory of panspermia. Panspermia is essentially the theory that life comes from off the earth -- it has developed into a theory entitled 'Cosmic Ancestry' now, and includes many more environmental ideas. It argues that the Earth is not a biologically closed ecosystem -- apart from the fact that human-made spacecraft have propelled genetical material beyond the earth notwithstanding, Panspermia and such theories argue that the universe has, indeed, may be full of spores and other types of genetic 'pieces', viruses and the like, that occasionally find their way to earth, and rarely but occasionally survive the entry and become grafted onto the genetic structures on Earth.
This text with Wickramasinghe covers the range of ideas, including early theories from the late nineteenth century. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe also argue for an Anthropic Principle of Cosmology here -- that there is a purpose to the universe, and that human beings have a special place. Hoyle asks the question, why should we not believe there is a guiding principle in biology by intelligences beyond our own? Why is it that people are accepting of a God-principle, but not of intelligences that might fall between God and our own? These are rather dramatic and controversial ideas, to say the least. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe argue for a scientific pantheism, with God as the universe.
Hoyle's ideas are interesting, and backed up with impressive science (chemistry, physics, and biology). However, it is still very cutting-edge and beyond the mainstream thinking -- Hoyle prods the more Darwinian theories for evidence, while accepting that there is in fact no more evidence for Panspermia.
An interesting text for the edge of science. This is not what I believe, either scientifically nor as a theologian, but it is fascinating to see how such ideas are developed. |
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Review Summary: bad science fiction |
Date: 2003-10-05 |
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Details: Re: "Noone realizes it but this work is a classic on the issue of Darwinism. It has been 'refuted' so many times and still survives one must wonder if it doesn't scare Darwinists." So does astrology survive. Guess what? Astrology doesn't "scare" astronomers. It is sad to see someone of Fred Hoyle's former stature reject the scientific method and embrace mysticism. ("No one" is spelled "no one", not "noone".) |
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Review Summary: A classic Darwin critique |
Date: 2003-07-28 |
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Details: Noone realizes it but this work is a classic on the issue of Darwinism. It has been 'refuted' so many times and still survives one must wonder if it doesn't scare Darwinists. One doesn't have to accept their perspective to see that the statistical difficulties of the original Darwinian theory were fatal, and should have been seen all along.
Attempts to deal with statistics in the Darwinian field have left a generation confused on the subject. The paradigm, to survive, has to keep the troops muddled. |
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out of 4 Reviews
