Once I Had Learnt My Twelve Times

In The Popular Mind, If Hoyle Is Remembered It Is As The Prime Mover Of The Discredited Steady State Theory Of The Universe. "everybody Knows" That The Rival Big Bang Theory Won The Battle Of The Cosmologies, But Few (not Even Astronomers) Appreciate That The Mathematical Formalism Of The Now-favoured Version Of Big Bang, Called Inflation, Is Identical To Hoyle's Version Of The Steady State Model.

We Are Inescapably The Result Of A Long Heritage Of Learning, Adaptation, Mutation And Evolution, The Product Of A History Which Predates Our Birth As A Biological Species And Stretches Back Over Many Thousand Millennia... Going Further Back, We Share A Common Ancestry With Our Fellow Primates; And Going Still Further Back, We Share A Common Ancestry With All Other Living Creatures And Plants Down To The Simplest Microbe. The Further Back We Go, The Greater The Difference From External Appearances And Behavior Patterns Which We Observe Today.

Life Cannot Have Had A Random Beginning. ... The Trouble Is That There Are About Two Thousand Enzymes, And The Chance Of Obtaining Them All In A Random Trial Is Only One Part In 10 To The 40,000 Power, An Outrageously Small Probability That Could Not Be Faced Even If The Whole Universe Consisted Of Organic Soup.

It Is In The World Of Ideas And In The Relation Of His Brain To The Universe Itself That The Superiority Of Man Lies. The Rise Of Man May Justly Be Described As An Adventure In Ideas.

The Suggestion That Petroleum Might Have Arisen From Some Transformation Of Squashed Fish Or Biological Detritus Is Surely The Silliest Notion To Have Been Entertained By Substantial Numbers Of Persons Over An Extended Period Of Time.