Can computers help us read the mind of nature? | Paul Davies

For too long, scientists focused on what we can see. Now they are at last starting to decode life's software

This summer marked the centenary of one of Britain's most famous and controversial scientists - the astronomer Fred Hoyle. Hoyle's championing of steady-state cosmology was daring enough, and turned out to be ultimately misguided, but his foray into the origin and nature of life in the 1970s prompted fierce criticism. He argued that the odds of life spontaneously springing from a non-living mix of chemicals were comparable to that of a whirlwind sweeping through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 707.

Creationists often seize on Hoyle's analogy to argue that life must have had a divine origin, which is curious because in 1970 the Nobel prizewinner Jacques Monod reasoned the exact opposite, citing the extreme improbability of life as an argument for atheism. He thought that if the laws of nature were somehow rigged in favour of life, it would look like design. Francis Crick, another committed atheist, also commented that life's origin seemed "almost a miracle".

Continue reading...