by Piter Kehoma Boll
More than six years ago, when this blog was just starting, I wrote an article about a poor old scientist, Donald I. Williamson, and his absurd ideas of hybridogenesis, i.e., the idea that new organisms could arrive by hybridizing very distantly related species, such as crossing a beetle with an earthworm. Williamson passed away two years ago and continued to defend his baseless hypothesis to the end.
Later on, I presented two other scientists with similarly ridiculous ideas: Retallack and his land Ediacara hypothesis, and Duesberg and his AIDS conspiracy theory. Now, I’m here to talk about an even more severe case of dellusion, and one that is as serious as Duesberg’s, because it is also followed by a bunch of crazy people.
The dellusion has a name, the Hoyle-Wickramasinghe “””””theory”””””, or H-W theory for short. His main follower currently is Wickramasinghe himself, more precisely Chandra Wickramasinghe, since the other guy, Fred Hoyle, is already decomposing and emitting Galactic Center infrared waves (you’ll understand it soon).
Professor Chandra Wickramasinghe and cabillions of bacteria glowing behind him. Photo by Wikimedia user Davidnoy.*
Wickramasinghe is a Sri Lankan-born British mathematician, astronomer and astrobiologist who since the 1960 worked with the now galactic-center-like deceased astronomer Fred Hoyle. They seem to have found in each other someone to support their mental disorder, as they formulated the hypothesis that life came to Earth from space. No, wait… it’s not that simple. They stated that life COMES to Earth from space… all the time!
Excuse me?
We all have heard of panspermia, right? The idea that life perhaps did not originate on Earth, but arrived here from space. Well, that may be a plausible idea. Perhaps the first microorganisms that appeared on Earth indeed came from space, but we know for sure, based on molecular analyses, that all current life forms originated from a single ancestor that is thought, based on fossils AND molecular data, to have existed about 3.5 billion years ago. We are, therefore, all part of a big family.
The problem with Wickramasinghe and his puppies (which are more than I expected, I have to say) is that they claim that new organisms are arriving all the time in comets and asteroids. They consider that the “sudden” complexity of life on Earth as seen in the fossil record, such as, for example, the appearance of the first cyanobacteria or the Cambrian explosion, could not have happened by simple neo-Darwinian evolution. So the logical explanation for them is… ALIENS! Alien viruses arrive, infect cells, mix their genetic material with that of the host and, voilà, a new complex lifeform appears.
During his career, Wickramasinghe made several statements that did not please the scientific community. He said, for example, that some pandemics, such as the 1918 flu pandemic and several other outbreaks of viral diseases are the result of cometary dust bringing the virus to Earth and scattering it throughout the planet. This view is, of course, dismissed by all serious researchers.
Recently, to my surprise, an apparently reputable journal, Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology, published a paper authored by Wickramasinghe and his puppies that defends again this nonsense idea of continuous extraterrestrial delivery of life. They suggest that the entire Galaxy comprises a gigantic biosphere and that life is being transported from here to there and back for billions and billions of years. But perhaps the most astonishing claim, and the one that made so many people become aware of this comedy disguised as science, is that octopuses came from space as eggs.
Yes, that’s exactly what the team proposed! They propose that the genetic and structural complexity of octopuses, squids and and cuttlefish, which is, according to them, hard to explain by “tradional neo-Darwinian evolution or even by massive horizontal gene transfer from viruses” is the result of these creatures having evolved somewhere else in the Galaxy and later coming to Earth in frozen eggs.
Another hilarious evidence they present about the existence of life across the whole Galaxy is by comparing the mid-infrared spectrum emitted by a source in the Galactic Center to the mid-infrared spectrum emitted by partially degraded bacteria. The patterns are very similar and this is, according to them, an evidence that the Galactic Center is crowded with bacteria. But what are the references that sustain these data? Guess what? It’s Wickramasinghe’s own previous works! Throughout the whole paper the only thing that the team can find to sustain their claims is their own previous work. No one else publishes on this subject because it does not make sense!
I think we can all agree that Wickramasinghe would fit better in a sensationalist and anti-scientific place such as the nonsense shows of History Channel than in a science lab.
If you want to laugh more or torture yourself with more bullshit, you can read the whole paper:
Steele EJ, Al-Mufti S, Augustyn KA, Chandrajith R, Coghlan JP, Coulson SG, Ghosh S, Gillman M, Gorczynski RM, Klyce B, Louis G, Mahanama K, Oliver KR, Padron J, Qu J, Schuster JA, Smith WE, Snyder DP, Steele JA, Stewart BJ, Temple R, Tokoro G, Tout CA, Unzicker A, Wainwright M, Wallis J, Wallis DH, Wallis MK, Wetherall J, Wickramasinghe DT, Wickramasinghe JT, Wickramasinghe NC, & Liu Y (2018). Cause of Cambrian Explosion – Terrestrial or Cosmic? Progress in Biophysics and Molecular Biology 136: 3–23.
And you can also read more about the adventure that is Wickramasinghe’s dellusional life on Wikipedia:
Wikipedia. Chandra Wickramasinghe. Available at < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chandra_Wickramasinghe >. Access on June 11, 2018.
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Earthling Nature 
Were you going to provide oppositional data?
Or just nit pick at someone else’s theories.
This article is Not worth the read.
The whole biological knowledge from the past 100 years is oppositional data. Thank you.
Not to say it cannot be completely overturned on its head in the next 100 years! After all, Earth was supposed to be at the center of the Universe before Copernicus and Galileo, Darwin was laughed at as an apeman caricature, and nobody listened to Alfred Wegener’s theory of plate tectonics or Mendel’s contribution to modern genetics till much much later, posthumously, or the discovery of gorillas as legit creatures only in 1903 as opposed to ” hairy women”! Keep an open mind and do not be so certain and rigid in setting down how all science evolves. None of us has a time machine to travel to the past or to the future. If we have learned anything thus far, it is that we have learned basically nothing about the origin of RNA/DNA ( abiogenesis? where does it happen in the lab, ever?), the origin of species ( there could be intra-species refinement such as sweeter and longer bananas, but bananas eventually turning into turnips or inter-species evolution, where is it??) , and more specifically, the origin of Homo sapiens ( Art, literature and civilization explodes mysteriously about 50,000 years ago due to sudden brain growth out of nowhere?). Too much to be discovered and unanswered questions.
Hi
I’m interested in this comment:
“we know for sure, based on molecular analyses, that all current life forms originated from a single ancestor.”
I’d appreciate some guidance as to where I can go for the evidence of this – books, websites, etc – ideally a kind of ‘molecular analyses for dummies.’
My background is in physics and we rarely say that we know things for sure, leaning towards ‘the evidence suggests…’ or ‘our current understanding is…’
Have you heard the joke about the astronomer, physicist and mathematician on a train in Scotland?
When I say “we know for sure”, I mean that we know it kind of like we know for sure that the Earth is rotating. You can read more about the common ancestor of all life forms on Wikipedia’s article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_universal_common_ancestor
This was an entirely disrespectful article about a senior scientist with a long and distinguished history of research. His ideas may be a minority view but there is a cogent argument to be made and laughing at him isn’t proper. It’s actually about as anti-science as one can get. Panspermia is a reasonable idea.
It’s seems that you don’t know very well what science is.
You have to be joking. The eminent palaeontologist, the Curator of Fossil Reptiles and Birds at the Natural History Museum and BBC presenter, Dr Alan Charig put Hoyle and WIckramasinghe’s ludicrous statements about all the Archaeopteryx fossils being forgeries more than 30 years ago and the basis of his comments still exist today. Apparently, if they were all forgeries, then in mid-19th century Bavaria they had tools at their disposal significantly more advanced than anything even available today. Even to have suggested such a ludicrous idea showed that in this area of science Wickramasinghe, like Foyle, was markedly out of his depth. Just because you have expertise in one area, it doesn’t make you competent in others and this was the case here. Dr Charig always called them ‘Foyle and Rickmansworth’ which made me laugh.