In the overall discussion of ‘Origins’, a fascinating character worth looking at is Sir Fred Hoyle.
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He was an English astronomer and mathematician who first coined the phrase the
‘Big Bang’. This is a fact that pub quiz aficionados will often know. What they don’t often know is that he would eventually go against his original Big Bang theory because it was mathematically impossible.
In a famous lecture at Cardiff University he said “Life cannot have originated on Earth” much to the shock of the listening students. He waited for their gasp to die down and he said “I’ve done the calculations, and mathematically it is simply impossible”.
He followed up with the quote “rabbits produce rabbits and very little else”. He accepted minor variations (also known as adaptation) which is non controversial, however once you go beyond that into new animals etc. he and the mathematically conscious biologists are saying is that Darwinian evolution is dead. It’s impossible.
For anyone interested, here’s a free pdf of a book he published on the subject called ‘Mathematics of Evolution’
http://www.evolocus.com/Textbooks/Hoyle1999.pdf
In this fascinating book, Hoyle delves into topics such as combinatorial inflation, the complexity of genetic algorithms, and the emergence of novel traits, employing mathematical analysis to critique aspects of evolutionary theory.
