Hoyle's Fallacy - Details

Details

Hoyle's Fallacy derives from arguments most popular in the 1920s, prior to the modern evolutionary synthesis, which are rejected by evolutionary biologists. A preliminary step is to establish that the phase space containing some biological entity (such as humans, working cells, or the eye) is enormous, something not contentious. Hoyle's Fallacy is to infer from the huge size of the phase space that the probability that evolution yielded the entity is exceedingly low.

Sometimes, arguments exhibiting Hoyle's Fallacy also invoke Borel's Law, which claims incorrectly that highly improbable events do not occur. (If all possible outcomes of a natural process are highly improbable, then a highly improbable outcome is certain). The true Borel's Law is actually the Strong Law of large numbers, but creationists have taken a simple statement made by Borel in books written late in his life concerning probability theory and called this statement Borel's Law.

This "Borel's Law" is actually the universal probability bound, which makes sense mathematically, but when applied to evolution is axiomatically incorrect. The universal probability bound assumes that the event one is trying to measure is completely random, and some use this argument to prove that evolution could not possibly occur, since its probability would be much less than that of the universal probability bound. This, however, is fallacious, given that evolution is not a completely random effect (genetic drift), but rather proceeds with the aid of natural selection.

Hoyle's Fallacy is comparable to the older infinite monkey theorem but applied to cellular biochemistry instead of the works of William Shakespeare. The fallacy claims that the probability that a protein molecule could achieve a functional sequence of amino acids is too low to be realised by chance alone. Hoyle calculated this as being comparable to the probability that a tornado could sweep through a junkyard and randomly assemble a Boeing 747.

The argument conflates the difference between the complexity that arises from living organisms that are able to reproduce themselves (and as such may change to become more complex over time) with the complexity of inanimate objects, unable to pass on any reproductive changes (such as the multitude of parts manufactured in Boeing 747). The comparison breaks down because of this important distinction.

According to Ian Musgrave in Lies, Damned Lies, Statistics, and Probability of Abiogenesis Calculations:

These people, including Fred, have committed one or more of the following errors.

1. They calculate the probability of the formation of a "modern" protein, or even a complete bacterium with all "modern" proteins, by random events. This is not the abiogenesis theory at all.
2. They assume that there is a fixed number of proteins, with fixed sequences for each protein, that are required for life.
3. They calculate the probability of sequential trials, rather than simultaneous trials.
4. They misunderstand what is meant by a probability calculation.
5. They underestimate the number of functional enzymes/ribozymes present in a group of random sequences.