Hoyle & Wickramasinghe were not naive about biology & paleontology

I would say that the fact that they thought that they could do a worthwhile calculation is an example of considerable naivity concerning biology. It presimes that they have an understanding of life sufficient to narrow down how it could have come abou to the point where such a calculation is feasible. Given the variety of ideas then and since that is not only naive but clearly false.I also find this comment of yours absurd:
"The only thing stopping them and Behe from being YECs is that they don't accept thescientific and theological implications of a literal global flood (and Hoyle is no longer with us of course)."As an astronomer Hoyle was well aware of the antiquity of the universe. But even without that they are not doubt aware of the very strong evidence against a young Earth and reject it on that basis.And what are the "scientific and theological condequences" - it seems to me clear that they are ones that Christians would reject. They are that science is incapable of telling us about the past because God has rigged the evidence in an intnetional and massive deception. And if God is so determined to deceive, how can you trust ANYTHING ?

As I said I consider it naive to believe that the probability can be calculated. Can you give me a good reason to think otherwise ? How can we make this claculation without a very good understanding of how it happened and under what conditions. Do you want to tell me what role they allowed for Cairns Smith's clays. Kaufman's hypercycles or the pyrites chemistry currently favouredf by a number of researches ? How about RNA world or the hypotheses of a preceding state based on PNA ?Oh and the idea that the Flood solves the problem of "how gene types come together" is completely absurd. Creationism "solves" the problem by deus ex machina - any pattern is possible so there is no possibility that we could argue that it could not produce any set of observations- Where it fails is in giving positive reasons for why we see the patterns that we DO see and ecpalining WHY they are so strongly consistent with evolution.

So they assumed that a certain number of proteins needed to be assembled. Presumably as the minimum requirement for a replicator capable of evolving. Did they justify that assumption ? Because I don't think that anyone now would say that they knew.As for your point about the RNA world, I am afraid gaps in our ideas act against your argument. They indicate that we do not know enough to come up with a reliable probability calculation.As for your claims about the Flood I would disagree. The main attempt to explain the fossil record is based on the assumption that eco-systems were caught entire and somehow happened to end up in an order that matches the fossil record. But there is no clear match with geological age (this is especially disturbing given the reliance on accelerated radioactive decay to explain radiometric dating - it places quite strict constraints on the order in which beds form - the relative timing has to be the same and you have to compress the scale by many orders of magnitude). There are serious problems with the fossils actually found - I raised some on marine fossils in another thread, but there are others. Why for example do we find a sequence of whale ancestors leading TO modern whales instead of FROM modern whales ? Why don't we find whales swiming with icthyosaurs and plesiosaurs, before their shore dwelling and terrestrial ancestors, which by your scheme would be fossilised last ?I would say that it is clear that the Flood here is "saved" by ad hoc assumptions which sound plausible (especially to believers) in the abstract but have not been detailed to the point where they can be tested, and that they some very hard work is needed before we can say that they even represent a viable alternative to the standard view within the restricted area of the fossil record. They have not been presented in a falsifiable form maing detailed predictions. The geological record as a whole contains many other features which seem to add up to a conclusive case that Flood geology cannot reasonably explain what we see.If the Flood is hard to rule out it is no more than a verification of the Duhem-Quine thesis. ANY theory can be defended from falsification by making enough ad hoc assumptions. Science works because scientists give up defending theories which require that much work to keep viable.