Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning

by Edited by John D. Barrow , Simon Conway Morris , Stephen J. Freeland , Charles L. Harper, Jr

• ISBN13: 9780521871020
• ISBN10: 0521871026
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2008-01-14
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

This highly interdisciplinary book highlights many of the ways in which chemistry plays a crucial role in making life an evolutionary possibility in the Universe. Cosmologists and particle physicists have often explored how the observed laws and constants of nature lie within a narrow range that allows complexity and life to evolve and adapt to their structures. Here, these anthropic considerations are diversified in a host of new ways to identify the most sensitive features of biochemistry and astrobiology. Celebrating the classic 1913 work of Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment for Life, this book looks at the delicate balance between chemistry and the ambient conditions in the Universe that permit complex chemical networks and structures to exist. It will appeal to a broad range of academics interested in the origin and existence of life in our universe.

Table of Contents

List of contributors	p. vii
Foreword: The improbability of life	p. xi
Preface	p. xxi
Acknowledgments	p. xxiii
The fitness of "fitness": Henderson in context
Locating "fitness" and L. J. Henderson	p. 3
Revisiting The Fitness of the Environment	p. 20
Is fine-tuning remarkable?	p. 31
Complexity in context: the metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory	p. 49
Tuning fine-tuning	p. 70
The fitness of the cosmic environment
Fitness and the cosmic environment	p. 97
The interconnections between cosmology and life	p. 114
Chemistry and sensitivity	p. 132
Fitness of the cosmos for the origin and evolution of life: from biochemical fine-tuning to the Anthropic Principle	p. 151
The fitness of the terrestrial environment
How biofriendly is the universe?	p. 169
Tuning into the frequencies of life: a roar of static or a precise signal?	p. 197
Life on earth: the role of proteins	p. 225
Protein-based life as an emergent property of matter: the nature and biological fitness of the protein folds	p. 256
Could an intelligent alien predict earth's biochemistry?	p. 280
Would Venus evolve on Mars? Bioenergetic constraints, allometric trends, and the evolution of life-history invariants	p. 318
The fitness of the chemical environment
Creating a perspective for comparing	p. 349
Fine-tuning and interstellar chemistry	p. 366
Framing the question of fine-tuning for intermediary metabolism	p. 384
Coarse-tuning in the origin of life?	p. 421
Plausible lipid-like peptides: prebiotic molecular self-assembly in water	p. 440
Evolution revisited by inorganic chemists	p. 456
Index	p. 491
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