On Wed, 20 Sep 2000, Todd Moody wrote:

[snip]

>This is the reasoning that led Fred Hoyle, and John von Neumann, and others
>(Lee Spetner's book Not By Chance is a good source) to reject the random
>origin of life thesis as mathematically too remote to be believable.
>Ironically, even Francis Crick accepts this conclusion, for exactly the same
>reasons.  This is what drives him to the "directed panspermia" theory of
>life's origin, according to which life had to have been implanted here by
>extraterrestrials.

In order to make an accurate calculation of the probability of a self
replicating system emerging from the primal soup, it is nessesary to
have a
complete knowledge of physics, to know all of the boundary conditions
existing
at the time, and to have access to immense computing resources. As
none of these
things were available at the time, and still aren't, their conclusion
must be
viewed with great caution. Fractal geometry tells us that immensely
complex
systems can be built from very simple rules, and that very small
changes in the
initial conditions can have profound effects.

Andy.