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Reviews of "The Cosmic Blueprint: New Discoveries in Nature's Creative Ability to Order the Universe" (1988), "Are We Alone? Philosophical Implications of the Discovery of Extraterrestrial Life" (1995), and "The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life" (1999) all by Paul Davies.
"The Cosmic Blueprint" is a good book describing the fascinating
subjects surrounding the origin of life and the universe that supports it. The book is a bit dated, published in 1988, but it has the
significant virtue of providing a very solid foundation. I've been reading books and articles for many years, and have a good grounding in physics, math, and the physical sciences. However, I can certainly imagine that others, with different backgrounds, would find some of these topics very hard to follow. Davies, provides a careful and thorough tutorial on the difficult subjects of chaos, complexity, self-organization, biogenesis, cosmology and consciousness.
Mostly, he is summarizing the work of others, but in a some cases his synthesis provides real insight. I really appreciated his demolition of the determinism that has pervaded science and the whole secular world since Newton. He had a great description of the two arrows of time. One is the familiar arrow of increasing entropy that derives from the dreary second law of thermodynamics. The also describes a second arrow of steadily increasing structure, organization and complexity. The optimistic arrow is "obvious" even though its cause remains unknown.
I missed seeing better coverage of Stuart Kauffman, my personal
favorite, and numerous ideas of newer authors, like Robert Wright, Lee Smolin and Susan Blackmore. However, if you've found other authors a little too breathless or confusing, Davies provides a solid and
enthusiastic description of this exciting field.
Next I read "The Fifth Miracle", anticipating a current version of the same general topics. This book was much more focused on biogenesis and related issues. As expected, Davies provided thorough coverage of this complex and controversial field. As I had hoped,, he provided the latest information on the thermophilic bacteria and the new light their existence sheds of the possible origin of Earthlife deep in the crust and below the sea bottom. This exciting discovery helps explain how life arose so soon after the end of the period of heavy bombardment that Earth endured until as recently as 3.8 billion years ago.
But, not satisfied with providing one answer to this mystery, he also suggested a second one. The likely exchange of material between the Earth and Mars, exemplified by the infamous ALH84001 meteorite, is not much in doubt. Davies explains how this transfer can happen without pulverizing or vaporizing the affected material. He then couples this idea with the theories of panspermia to point out that both Mars and Earth may have been surrounded by a tenuous biosphere that extended into space. These biospheres overlapped and, importantly, would have
provided newly evolved life a haven from planetary surface conditions made intolerable by early bombardments of massive planetesimals. I found it interesting that while he emphasized the amazing radiation resistance of some species of bacteria, pointed out how this lends support to the panspermia theory and described the biosphere's extension into space, he didn't actually say that the bacterial radiation hardness could have been *caused* by repeated episodes of living off-planet during numerous sterilizations of the early Earth's surface.
He ends the book with some interesting speculations on whether the universe has some built-in predilection for life. Of course, there is no real answer to this question yet, but Davies provides a service in suggesting and supporting the possibility. This hope provides an antidote to the depressing and prevalent perspectives of Monad,
Weinberg, Gould and others that there is no purpose or direction to the universe.
Lastly, I read Davies' middle book (actually he's written two dozen of them) on the question of extraterrestrials. He starts with a good history of thought on the subject, which goes back a surprisingly long way. Then he discusses the panspermia hypothesis and its implication for independent origin of life in the universe, the significance of a possible message from the stars, and the various aspects of the
anthropomorphic principle. Spliced in the middle is a chapter about the nature of consciousness.
I was disappointed that the prospect of a technological singularity didn't factor into Davies' analysis of Fermi's question. But overall, this brief book provides a good review of thinking on this intriguing subject.
Ted Anderson (10-June-2000)
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