Geneticist Michael Denton has just this week released the latest in a series of wonderful books on the subject of how the natural world, specifically the chemical properties of the world, appear to be exquisitely calibrated to permit intelligent life to exist on our planet. His latest book is titled The Miracle of the Cell, and having read Denton's earlier work, I look forward to sitting down with this one as soon as it arrives.
The Miracle of the Cell follows two other books which are both easy for the layman to grasp and very much worth reading. The first was titled Fire-Maker, and the second is titled The Wonder of Water.
Each of them provides the reader with fascinating information on almost every page as they examine two commonplace phenomena in our environment, fire and water, and explain that if those two phenomena didn't have precisely the physical and chemical properties they do, life would be either very much diminished, or even impossible. Certainly living things as complex as human beings could never exist.
In Fire-Maker, for instances, Denton reflects upon all the properties of planet earth that have to be just right for the phenomenon of fire to exist and then recounts all the physical characteristics of an animal such as human beings that have to be just as they are for that animal to be able to use fire. He then examines what that animal's culture would be like were the animal or the earth even slightly different such that fire could not be made or harnessed.
It all leaves one shaking one's head in amazement.
Here are a couple of related videos that'll give you an idea of what the books are about:
The more we learn about the world in which we live the harder it is to think that it's all just a marvelous coincidence that everything has just the properties it does. Everything about the world - the universe, the earth and living things - seems to shout that it was intentionally engineered.
All of these books can be ordered from my favorite bookstore Hearts and Minds Bookstore in south central Pennsylvania.
