The chance that higher life forms might have emerged through evolutionary processes is comparable with the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the material therein.
Interpretation
The complexity of life arising through evolution is extremely unlikely, akin to a random event creating a sophisticated aircraft.
Fred Hoyle's quote emphasizes the improbability of complex life forms emerging solely through natural evolutionary processes. By comparing this phenomenon to a tornado assembling a Boeing 747 from a junkyard, he suggests that such an event is highly unlikely, thereby casting doubt on the sufficiency of evolutionary mechanisms to account for the complexity seen in living organisms.
In practice
In a discussion about the origins of life, this quote could illustrate skepticism towards purely naturalistic explanations.
A commonsense interpretation of the facts suggests that a superintellect has monkeyed with physics, as well as with chemistry and biology, and that there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature. The numbers one calculates from the facts seem to me so overwhelming as to put this conclusion almost beyond question.
Once we see, however, that the probability of life originating at random is so utterly minuscule as to make it absurd, it becomes sensible to think that the favorable properties of physics, on which life depends, are in every respect deliberate.... It is, therefore, almost inevitable that our own measure of intelligence must reflect higher intelligence -even to the limit of God.
Of course there are worlds. Millions of them! Every star you see has worlds, and most of those you don't see.
Economics is not an exact science. It's a combination of an art and elements of science. And that's almost the first and last lesson to be learned about economics: that in my judgment, we are not converging toward exactitude, but we're improving our data bases and our ways of reasoning about them.
We must be careful not to confuse data with the abstractions we use to analyse them.
A fundamental principle of information theory is that you can’t guarantee outcomes… in order for an experiment to yield knowledge, it has to be able to fail. If you have guaranteed experiments, you have zero knowledge
'Frankenstein' did not invent the fear of science; the novel found its audience because it dramatized anxieties that already existed. Although popular entertainment can, over the long run, shape public perceptions, it becomes popular in the first place only if it addresses preexisting hopes, fears, and fascinations.
Modern science has been a voyage into the unknown, with a lesson in humility waiting at every stop. Many passengers would rather have stayed home.
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