On the face of it, such a scenario for life’s origin seemed hopelessly improbable. Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe estimated that the odds against the required ten to twenty amino acids coming together by chance (remember that at this stage of the game there is no natural selection and so no chemical evolution) to form an enzyme is on the order of one chance out of 1020. Given the size of the earth’s oceans and the billions of years available, they thought such an improbability could be faced. But they point out that there are two thousand different enzymes made out of amino acids, all of which would have to be formed by chance, and the odds of that happening are around 1 in 1040.000, odds so “outrageously small” that they could not be faced “even if the whole universe consisted of organic soup.”26 And