Volatile Stardust

The fertile mind of astronomer Fred Hoyle.

Kenneth Silber from the March 2006 issue

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Yet Hoyle's concept of this super-intellect, though somewhat vague, was different from ideas consonant with traditional theism. He thought it was part and parcel of the natural world, rather than a supernatural being. Such an entity might be diffused throughout the universe, in clouds of living matter; perhaps, he suggested, it was reconstituting itself on Earth, as the latest turn in a cosmic cycle.

By this point, Hoyle was veering increasingly far from the scientific mainstream. He became convinced that extraterrestrial life had seeded Earth's biology and shaped its ongoing development. Extrapolating from the presence of carbon compounds in interstellar dust, Hoyle and the Cardiff astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe argued that genetic material rains onto Earth and becomes incorporated into terrestrial genomes. Diseases were one consequence of this, marked by correlations between outbreaks and celestial phenomena such as comets and meteor storms. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe suggested that the AIDS virus arrived from space in the mid-1970s and was originally passed to humans from rainwater via cuts on their feet.

Scientific reaction to such ideas was overwhelmingly dismissive, sometimes hostile. Reviewing one of Hoyle and Wickramasinghe's life-from-space books, the Oxford chemist Peter Atkins said it was "not worth the paper it is written on." Further controversy ensued over the authenticity of the Natural History Museum's celebrated fossil specimen of archaeopteryx, a transitional species between dinosaurs and birds. Few scientists were impressed by the claims of Hoyle and several collaborators that the fossil's feather impressions were made by someone using bird feathers and cement.

Disputes like these brought Hoyle favorable attention from critics of Darwinian evolution. There were, however, notable differences between Hoyle's views and those of the antievolutionists. Hoyle's life-from-space picture was naturalistic; it could supplement rather than replace the Darwinian view. Moreover, in criticizing Big Bang theory as leaving insufficient time for life to develop, Hoyle was at an opposing extreme from biblical literalists who thought the universe was merely a few thousand years old.

Such tensions became evident during an Arkansas legal battle in the early 1980s, when the American Civil Liberties Union challenged a state law requiring that creationism be taught alongside evolution in public schools. Hoyle wrote a London Times article arguing that Darwinism deserved no privileged status, and Wickramasinghe went to Arkansas to testify for the state. Under cross-examination, Wickramasinghe said that there was no scientific basis for positing a universe thousands of years old, and that he and Hoyle believed it to be "essentially eternal." When he later upheld the ACLU's challenge, the judge expressed puzzlement that the state had called a witness so inimical to its case.

Nevertheless, one piece of Hoyle's thinking frequently resurfaces in arguments for creationism and intelligent design. Hoyle depicted the presumed origin of life from nonliving matter on the primordial Earth as being as implausible as the assembly of a functional jetliner by a tornado whirling through a junkyard. This analogy is vivid but dubious. The standard scientific view assumes life to have originated not in a single leap from simple chemicals to cells but through gradual accumulations of chemical complexity. Yet the junkyard tornado analogy spins on, often shorn of its origin-of-life context and serving as a supposed point against any evolutionary change.

The Nobel Prize committee eventually honored William Fowler, the man who confirmed Hoyle's carbon resonance prediction, but Hoyle himself never won a Nobel, even though many scientists believed he deserved one for his work on stellar nucleosynthesis. The Nobel committee may have been deterred by his more far-out ideas. Still, Hoyle received various other honors, was knighted as Sir Fred, and died at age 86, having generated much light as well as heat.