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design: number with 40 thousand naughts [zeros] after it. It is enough to bury Darwin and the whole theory of evolution. There was no primeval soup, neither on this planet nor on any other, and if the beginnings of life were not random they must therefore have been the product of purposeful intelligence." However, Hoyle was also committed to a non-miraculous cause for the origin of life. So he joined the list, albeit a small one, of prominent scientists, who asserted that life had been delivered from outer space either by aliens or by a comet "infected" with bacteria. This notion, called "directed panspermia," was a radical new proposal, one which displeased many in the scientific community. "Francis Crick also thinks that life on Earth may have begun when aliens from another planet sent a rocket ship containing spores to seed the Earth. This is no idle thought; Crick first proposed it with chemist Leslie Orgel in 1973 in an article entitled "Directed Panspermia" in a professional science journal called Icarus. A decade later Crick wrote a book, Life Itself, reiterating the theory" Francis Crick is by all accounts a brilliant scientist. His elucidation of the structure of the DNA molecule with James Watson in 1953 won them the Nobel Prize for biology. He is considered one of the fathers of molecular biology. And yet, with his background he concluded that the spontaneous origin of life on the early Earth is impossible. '“* As Michael Behe noted: "The primary reason Crick subscribes to this unorthodox view is that he judges the undirected [random chance] origin of life to be a virtually insurmountable obstacle. ..."149 To many scientists the theory of extraterrestrial seeding of planet Earth was an embarrassment. However, it is an idea that will not die. Even as recently as December 1996, Dr. Andrei Arkhipov of the Institute of Radio Astronomy in the Ukraine claims that the ultimate origin of life on Earth began with microbes which had been delivered to the Earth as lumps of "alien waste." He published his view in the respected international ton m m astronomical research journal, Observatory. While the notion of human life arising from alien "dung" is rather unappealing, it does point out how intractable the problem of the origin of life has become. "Nothing illustrates more clearly just how intractable a problem the origin of life has become than the fact that world authorities can seriously toy with al td. ee ti 78 In 1981, Hoyle expressed the view that life on Earth must be the result of intelligent "The likelihood of the formation of life from inanimate matter is one to a In his book Darwin's Black Box, Michael J. Behe discussed the radical theory put forth by Crick and Hoyle: Molecular biologist Michael Denton discussed the irony of the panspermia theory: the idea of panspermia."