Page 31 - The Errors the American National Academy of Sciences

The NAS's Error Regarding the Origin of Life

would have us believe, for these tiny components to have come to-
gether stage by stage over millions of years.
Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe, both professors of
mathematics and astronomy, explain how there is no possibility

that life could have come about on its own as the result of chance,
either on the Earth or on another planet, in these terms:
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
20 2,000
(10 ) = 10 40,000 , 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 [by
chance or natural processes], this simple calculation wipes the
idea entirely out of court.

. . . Life cannot have had a random beginning. Troops of monkeys
thundering away at random on typewriters could not produce the
works of Shakespeare, for the practical reason that the whole ob-
servable universe is not large enough to contain the necessary
monkey hordes, the necessary typewriters, and certainly the
waste paper baskets required for the deposition of wrong at-
tempts. The same is true for living material. 12

As we have seen, what makes the emergence of the first cell
impossible is not only the unsuitable conditions in the primeval at-
mosphere, but also the complex structure of the cell and the fact
that that structure could not have come about by chance. There is
thus no reason why something which is impossible on Earth

should be able to take place on Mars. In the same way that it is im-
possible for random letters thrown onto the ground to make a
meaningful phrase on Earth, so it is also impossible on Mars.
Nobody can say "If we throw them onto the ground on Mars, a co-

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