mihkel4397: Fred Hoyle's calculation of probability of abiogenesis

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Therefore, isn't it a bit premature to claim that Mr. Hoyle was wrong?

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No. As a math teacher, I don't award credit if the student arrives at the correct answer through incorrect processes or faulty reasoning.Hoyle may have "guessed" the correct answer through his demonstrably faulty model, but people will be justified in denying him credit for his "contribution".The goal is not to somehow magically "guess" an answer and hope that in the end it will be correct. The goal in science is to try to understand reality, and that will require basing our conclusions on reliable data and logical thinking.Edited by Chiroptera, : Forgot dBCode tag.Edited by Chiroptera, : Removed last bit of post to tighten the topic of the post.

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"These monkeys are at once the ugliest and the most beautiful creatures on the planet./ And the monkeys don't want to be monkeys; they want to be something else./ But they're not."
-- Ernie Cline

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Which model are you talking about?

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His model where the atoms randomly come together to form a cell all at once.-

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So far, there is NO data that disproves his calculation of the chemical evolution.

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That is not the point. The point is that without understanding the possible pathways that could have formed life, his calculations are irrelevant. He simply showed that one possibility, that the amino acides and nucleotide all randomly came together to form the first cell all at once, is pretty darn unlikely. But scientists already knew that. Scientists at that time did not make the claim, and scientists today are not making the claim, that life rose all at once when the necessary materials randomly came together as envisioned by Hoyle.

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"As societies grow decadent, the language grows decadent, too. Words are used to disguise, not to illuminate, action: you liberate a city by destroying it. Words are to confuse, so that at election time people will solemnly vote against their own interests." -- Gore Vidal

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The Miller-Urey experiment actually got amino acids, but it was using conditions that didn't exist on the planet.

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The experiment has been repeated using all the proposed compositions of the early atmosphere; every one of them produced amino acids and other complex organics.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

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But weren't the proposed compositions of the early atmosphere that was used in the experiment criticized as not being accurate given new findings?

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I'm not sure what you are asking here. The Miller-Urey experiment used a composition that was believed at that time to be similar to that of the primordial atmosphere. Subsequent work indicated that the primordial atmosphere may have had a different composition; the experiment was repeated with the that composition, and essentially the same results were obtained. Urey-Miller type experiments have been performed with a variety of different atmospheric compostions and with a variety of different energy sources, and an organic "primordial soup" has been produced each time. I am not aware of any "null results" of a Miller-Urey experiment using what is now believed to have been the composition of the early atmosphere.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw

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The scientists continuously bring new fudge factors to explain the origin of life--vitalism, simple cell, primordial soup, RNA world, etc--to eventually drop them altogether.

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No, this is not what scientists are doing. Scientists are saying, "We do not know how life began on earth. If life arose naturally from the chemical environment of the primeval earth, here is a possible step in the overall process." They then test their ideas in a laboratory to see whether their proposal might be a step in the process that led to life.-

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There are still those enormous logistical problems I mentioned before.

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Hoyle did not deal with any logistical problems. He ignored logistical problems. He discussed a probability for a random assortment of nucleotides and amino acids to come together to form a cell all at once. This has nothing to do with any "logistics" in any scenario proposed for the formation of life.-

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therefore, Hoyle may be right, or he maybe wrong.

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No, he only considered one scenario that was not (and is not) under consideration. Even if it turns out that the formation of life on the surface of the earth through abiogenetic means is highly unlikely, Hoyle will still only have made a lucky guess. That is not the same as being right.

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"The fact that a believer is happier than a skeptic is no more to the point than the fact that a drunken man is happier than a sober one." -- George Bernard Shaw