Hoyle's fallacy

The junkyard tornado is an argument used to deride the probability of both abiogenesis and the evolution of higher lifeforms as comparable to "the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747." It was used originally by Fred Hoyle's statistical analysis applied to evolutionary origins, but similar observations predate Hoyle and have been found all the way back to Darwin's time. While Hoyle himself was an atheist, the argument has since become a mainstay of creationist and intelligent design criticisms of evolution.

This argument is rejected by the vast majority of biologists. From the modern evolutionary standpoint, while the odds of the sudden construction of higher lifeforms are indeed improbably remote, evolution proceeds in many smaller stages over a long period of time. The transition as a whole is plausible, as each step improves survivability; the 747 is not constructed in one single unlikely event, as the junkyard tornado posits.

According to Hoyle's analysis, the probability of cellular life evolving was about one-in-10^40,000.

He commented:

The chance that higher life forms might have emerged in this way is comparable to the chance that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.

This is a reflection of his stance reported elsewhere:

Life as we know it is, among other things, dependent on at least 2000 different enzymes. How could the blind forces of the primal sea manage to put together the correct chemical elements to build enzymes?

Hoyle used this to argue in favor of panspermia, that the origin of life on earth had come from preexisting life in space.

The junkyard tornado derives from arguments most popular in the 1920s, prior to the modern evolutionary synthesis, which are rejected by evolutionary biologists. A preliminary step is to establish that the phase space containing some biological entity (such as humans, working cells, or the eye) is enormous, something not contentious. The argument is then to infer from the huge size of the phase space that the probability that evolution yielded the entity is exceedingly low.

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Wikipedia