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Panspermia In 1908, the distinguished Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius suggested in his book, Worlds in the Mak- ing, that living spores could be driven through space by the pressure of light from the stars. Hoyle and Wickramasinghe’s proposal is based on their belief that interstellar space is filled with clouds of dust consisting mainly of cellulose or similar sugar-like organic material. The comet Kohoutek was examined spectroscopically on its near approach to Earth in 1973 and was found to contain at least two organic molecules...along with rock dust, polysaccharides, and related organic polymers, all of which are possible building blocks of life. The two astronomers’ idea also involves the idea that Earth collid- ing with a comet at some time in the past... The author says, “The Earth could have acquired all of its volatiles — including all the oceans — from such collisions (with comets). (p. 217) Francis Crick has made a further proposal. In his book, Life Itself, he, too, suggests an extraterrestrial origin for life...He suggests. ..that life in microscopic form may have been sent to other planets by alien beings in suitable protective vessels, that life is like a message in the bottle. (p. 218) ...professor of zoology at Oxford from 1946 to 1963. In 1949, Hardy astonished the British Association for the Advancement of the Sciences by suggesting in his presidential address to the zoological section that telepathy was relevant to biology. In the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Hardy wrote: “assuming the reality of telepathy,...the discovery that individual organisms are somehow in psychical connection across space is, of course, one of the most revolutionary...ever made.” Hardy professed himself to be a Darwinian, but it was a strange variety of Darwinism that enabled him to assert that “there is a general subconscious sharing of a form and behavior design, a sort of psychic blueprint between members of a species,” and that “the mathematical plans of growth seem to have all the appearance of pattern outside the physical world which has served as a plan for selective action by way of changing combinations of genes.” The dangerously heretical ideas and experiments of zoologists like Driesch and Hardy were not so much ignored by their fellow biologists as they were quarantined, in case they should prove contagious. (p. 234) One hundred and thirty years after the publication of The Origin of the Species, Darwinism is still a the- ory, and still lacks the decisive and incontestable empirical evidence that would end the debate once and for all; that would conclusively demonstrate the correctness of the theory and ensure its acceptance by the community. (p. 239) 181 Appendix B: Book Abstracts Francis Crick Alister Hardy Atlantis, Alien Visitation, and Genetic Manipulation