Junkyard tornado

Fallacious argument against abiogenesis of chance

The junkyard tornado, sometimes known as Hoyle's fallacy, is an argument against abiogenesis, using a calculation of its probability based on false assumptions, as comparable to "a tornado sweeping through a junk yard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein" and to compare the chance of obtaining even a single functioning protein by chance combination of amino acids to a solar system full of blind men solving Rubik's Cubes simultaneously. It was used originally by English astronomer Fred Hoyle (1915–2001) in his book The Intelligent Universe, where he tried to apply statistics to evolution and the origin of life. While Hoyle himself was an atheist, the argument has since become a mainstay in the rejection of evolution by religious groups. Hoyle's fallacy contradicts many well established and widely tested principles in the field of evolutionary biology. As the fallacy argues, the odds of the sudden construction of higher lifeforms are indeed improbable. However, what the junkyard tornado postulation fails to take into account is the vast amount of support that evolution proceeds in many smaller stages, each driven by natural selection rather than by random chance, over a long period of time. The Boeing 747 was not designed in a single unlikely burst of creativity, just as modern lifeforms were not constructed in one single unlikely event, as the junkyard tornado scenario suggests. The theory of evolution has been studied and tested extensively by numerous researchers and scientists and is the most scientifically accurate explanation for the origins of complex life.

The junkyard tornado derives from arguments most popular in the 1920s, prior to the modern evolutionary synthesis, which are rejected by evolutionary biologists. The junkyard tornado is also applied to cellular biochemistry. This is comparable to the older infinite monkey theorem but instead of the works of William Shakespeare, the claim is that the probability that a protein molecule could achieve a functional sequence of amino acids is too low to be realised by chance alone. Evolutionary biology explains how complex cellular structures evolved by analysing the intermediate steps required for precellular life. It is these intermediate steps that are omitted in creationist arguments, which is the cause of their overestimating of the improbability of the entire process. arguing that the existence of God, who under theistic uses of Hoyle's argument is implicitly responsible for the origin of life, defies probability far more than does the spontaneous origin of life even given Hoyle's assumptions. Dawkins describes God as the Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit,