The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life

by Paul C.W. Davies

Book Overview

Are We Alone in the Universe? In this provocative and far-reaching book, internationally acclaimed physicist and writer Paul Davies confronts one of science's great outstanding mysteries -- the origin... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0684837994
• ISBN13: 9780684837994
• Release Date: March 1999
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Searching for the Laws of Life

According to the book of Genesis, God's fifth act of creation was to create life on earth. Modern science has a different myth. In the beginning, there was a simple soup of inorganic chemicals: water, ammonia and methane. And into this soup came a bolt of lightning that brought into being the amino acids that gradually assembled themselves into peptides and proteins, and the nucleotides from which came RNA and DNA. And the DNA learned the art of becoming self-replicating and so began the ascent of life. In this well-reasoned book, the distinguished physicist Paul Davies suggests that believing the scientific myth demands an act of faith and credulity as great as believing in the literal truth of the Biblical story. He is one of many scientists who have calculated the seemingly impossible odds of all this happening by chance. This is not some back door into intelligent design, but instead an exploration of some profoundly important ideas in biology that make us realize that there are some gaping holes in our current models. Paul Davies starts with some questions: is life a random chemical accident, a meaningless fluke in an accidental universe? Or is the universe somehow "friendly" to biology? Are the laws of nature such that they demand the eventual appearance of life, not just on earth, but also throughout the universe? The book does not come up with a definitive answer, but it explores some very interesting ideas, including the well-known concepts of the late Fred Hoyle and Chandra Wickramasinghe that life may have arrived from space. It is a puzzle how life seems to have appeared so soon after the earth became a stable globe, and the remarkable adaptability of living organisms to the most astonishingly inhospitable environments. Inorganic processes tend to run down and become disorganized over time: they show entropy. By contrast living processes become progressively more organized, a process that requires massive amounts of information. It is not difficult to calculate that the amount of information required for even the simplest organism far out strips the biochemical processes of an organism. Thus the implication that life requires a new fundamental law of nature that is yet to be discovered. Paul Davies does not shy away from discussing the consequences of these ideas or an undiscovered law or laws that would make the appearance of life inevitable. And would also imply a progressive march toward greater and greater complexity, that would eventually lead to sentience. This book does not provide any final answers, but is an excellent introduction to an exceedingly important topic.

The best little book I have read in years.

The fifth miracle is an outstanding little book that discloses a miriad of possibilities about the origin of life on earth. The controversy arises when Davis exposes some unorthodox theories like Panspermia, the truth is that when he does that he is really persuasive. Paul Davies is an intelligent scientist and one that has kept updated and with experience on field, so his arguments are no less than powerful and convincing, once again, even the controversial ones. Though he doesn't take part in most of the different theories explained, his book might look a little biased, but great, besides he may even be right.

An Engaging Overview

The Fifth Miracle by Paul Davies, a theoretical physicist who works primarily on the topic of quantum gravity, is a very readable book on the origin of life. Although there is little that is new in the text, the author has put the information into perspective for the reader, discussing a number of aspects and points of view. Probably one of the most salient points he makes is that if , as some would have us believe, life is ubiquitous to the universe to the extent that water equals life, then the basic scientific world view may have to be overhauled. He writes: In claiming that water means life, NASA scientists are not merely being upbeat about their project. They are making--tacitly--a huge [italics] and profound assumption about the nature of nature. They are saying, in effect, that the laws of the universe are cunningly contrived to coax life into being against the raw odds; that the mathematical principles of physics, in their elegant simplicity, somehow know in advance about life and its vast complexity. If life follows from soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them: 'Make life!' And, through life, its by-products: mind, knowledge, understanding. It means the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct. But if it is, it represents a shift in the scientific world-view as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together. It should not be glossed over with glib statements that water plus organics equals life, obviously, for it is far from obvious (p. 246).This book and Rare Earth by Peter Douglas Ward and Donald Brownlee pretty much cover the life in the universe topic for anyone interested in the topic, and both are engagingly written and understandable.

The where and the how

This is a very good book; an interesting journey through the great riddle of where and how life may have started off mostly based on darwinism. The book not only deals with where life may have possibley come from but also how this amazing feature of the cosmos came to be. The more you read Paul Davies's honest inferences the more Godliness surrounds it. Its not enough to know where life started. Possibly as an ultra heat loving microbe (hyperthermophiles) living thousands of feet below the ground or a traveler from outerspace. But perhaps more profoud a question is how that initial being developed into todays's inscrutably complex machine known as the human being? How did biological information get there (DNA) and how what set up the complex facilities that transalate that information into biologically meaningful and intelligent beings? Are there laws of biology at work unknown to us? Is life a natural reaction or some wild a fluke that it couldn't happen twice in the universe? But it would have been nice if Davies had reflected more on thories of the mind and how that relates to cosmic conditioning and biological development. If mind is out there somewher with space-time and gravity then perhaps it somehow determined our existance. A concept davies does not get into here but I read it in his book, "God & The New Physics' as retroactie creativity

Life, the Universe and ... well ... everything

You can't fault Paul Davies for a lack of gumption. Anyone who'd subtitle his latest book, "the search for the origin and meaning of life" isn't in need of any assertiveness training courses. When I first picked up the book, I thought, "Yeesh, a physicist, writing about the origins of life. Wouldn't that be more the work of a molecular biologist?" But as I read on, I was gradually taken in by Davies spell. And that's saying something. If, five years ago, you'd told me I'd take the following ideas seriously, I'd have laughed nervously and edged away in a non-threatening manner. Here are Davies' ideas in a nutshell (no pun intended): 1) Life may have existed on Mars. 2) Life may still exist on Mars. 3) Life on earth may have arisen in space and migrated here (panspermia) 4) The "natural" home for life on earth may be in the hot depths of the crust, kilometres beneath the surface.As I say, five years ago, those ideas would have been heresy. But it's been an interesting five years. The (in)famous martian meteorite, the discovery of tiny, primitive forms of life deep within the earth, life thriving around hydrothermal vents, the discovery of intricate chemical reactions happening in space ... well, it's been fun. And Davies takes full advantage of living in such "interesting times". Davies makes a thoughtful (if not always persuasive) case for his views on the origins of life. And I found it a really enjoyable read. If you're at all interested in where life came from, or whether there might be life "out there" this is a great book to begin with. Davies is an excellent writer with some fascinating ideas and a great style: "In a subject supercharged with such significance, lack of agreement is unsurprising. Some scientists regard life as a bizarre chemical freak, unique in the universe, whereas others insist that it is the expected product of felicitous natural laws. If the magnificent edifice of life is the consequence of a random and purely incidental quirk of fate, as the French biologist Jacques Monod claimed, we must surely find common cause with his bleak atheism, so eloquently expressed in these words: "The ancient covenant is in pieces: man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he has emerged only by chance. Neither his destiny nor his duty have been written down." But if it transpires that life emerged more or less on cue as part of the deep lawfulness of the cosmos -- if it is scripted into the great cosmic drama in a basic manner -- it hints at a universe with a purpose. In short, the origin of life is the key to the meaning of life." And while I might not agree with all his ideas ... ask me again in five years.