One can hardly imagine a stronger advocacy for dissent from mainstream science. Hoyle echoes here the words of the influential second-century physician Galen of Pergamum: “From my very youth I despised the opinion of the multitude and longed for truth and knowledge, believing that there was for man no possession more noble or divine.” However, as Rees has pointed out, isolation has its price. Science progresses not in a straight line from A to B but in a zigzag path shaped by critical reevaluation and fault-finding interaction. The continuous evaluation provided by the scientific establishment that Hoyle so despised is what creates the checks and balances that keep scientists from straying too far in the wrong direction. By imposing upon himself academic isolation, Hoyle denied himself these corrective forces.

Hoyle’s idiosyncratic ideas on the origin of life had undoubtedly also fueled his refusal to abandon the steady state theory. Here is how Hoyle himself put it:

The proper philosophical point of view, I believe, for thinking about evolution cosmologically involves issues that are superastronomical, as one inevitably gets as soon as one attempts to understand the origin of biological order. Faced with problems of superastronomical order of complexity, biologists have resorted to fairy tales. This is shown by a consideration of the order of the amino acids in any one of hundreds of enzymes [Hoyle estimated that the probability of forming two thousand enzymes at random from amino acids was about one in 10^40,000.] . . . to have any hope of solving the problem of biological origins in a rational way a universe with an essentially unlimited canvas is required [emphasis added], a universe in which the entropy per unit mass [a measure of the disorder] does not increase inexorably, as it does in big bang cosmologies. It is to provide just such an unlimited canvas that the steady-state theory is required, or so it seems to me.

In other words, Hoyle believed that an evolving universe, with its associated increasing disorder, does not provide the necessary conditions for something as ordered as biology to emerge. He also did not think that the age of the universe, as implied by the value of the Hubble constant, was sufficient for complex molecules to form. I should note that mainstream evolutionary biologists flatly reject this argument. In essence, Hoyle tried to revive the “watchmaker analogy” that characterized all intelligent design arguments by comparing the random origin of a living cell to the likelihood that “a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747 from the materials therein.” Biologist Richard Dawkins labeled this reasoning “Hoyle’s fallacy,” pointing out that biology does not require intricate life structures to arise in a single step. Organisms that can reproduce themselves are able to generate complexity through successive changes, while inanimate objects are unable to pass on reproductive modifications.

To progress somewhat beyond these partial explanations for Hoyle’s blunder, especially when it comes to his apparent denial of having made a mistake, we need to understand the concept of denial a little better. Denial seldom evokes sympathy, especially in scientific circles. Justifiably, scientists regard denial as being contradictory to the research spirit, where old theories have to give way to new ones, when experimental results so require. Research, however, is still carried out by humans, and Sigmund Freud himself had already postulated that humans have developed denial as one of their defense mechanisms against traumas or external realities that threaten the ego. We are all familiar, for instance, with denial as the first of the five recognized stages of grief. What is perhaps less widely known is that the experience of being wrong in a major enterprise constitutes such a trauma. The judicial system provides ample evidence that this is indeed the case. There have been quite a few incidents in which both victims of violent crimes and prosecutors in such cases absolutely refused to believe that the person originally found guilty was actually innocent, even after DNA evidence or new testimony exonerated this person conclusively. Denial offers the troubled mind a way to avoid reopening experiences that were thought to have been brought to a successful closure. To be sure, being wrong in a scientific theory cannot be compared with erring in convicting an innocent person, but the experience is traumatic nonetheless, and we may assume that denial, in this sense, may have played a part in Hoyle’s blunder.