From: Damien Broderick (damien@ariel.ucs.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sat Aug 08 1998 - 04:04:03 MDT
The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin of Life
By Paul Davies, Allen Lane, 260pp, $A35
ISBN: 0 7139 9215 8
Reviewed by Damien Broderick
For a decade, Paul Davies has been an Australian national treasure. Before
that, he was a British national treasure who fled Thatcher's UK because its
scientifically trained Prime Minister was so mean to science (and to
everyone else). He found a home at the University of Adelaide as Professor
of Theoretical Physics, publishing controversial books on science, until
his colleagues persuaded him that a chair as Professor of Natural
Philosophy might be more to the university's taste.
Now, having collected the nearly two million dollar Templeton Prize for
reconciling the ways of God to physics, he signs himself (in one of his
many generous introductions to other people's books) simply `Cosmologist
and author'. It's hard to know if he was run out of the lab on a rail by
indignant atheists, or removed himself to his South Australian country
property the better to produce an endless stream of splendid popular
science books on topics ranging from the new physics, the origins and
destiny of the universe, complexity theory, extraterrestrial and more
homely life and, notoriously, the Mind of God.
He has had the good fortune to find an immense public audience for his
ideas. Seeing yet another Davies book in the stores, some have been heard
muttering at his prolificity. That is unfair. In the ring with the
Hemingway of science writing, Isaac Asimov (who published hundreds of
admirable books on a score of topics), Davies and his competitors are
modest striplings.
What's more, Paul Davies has taken the trouble to know his stuff, even when
- as in this case - he is writing away from his field. His gift is to
synthesise knowledge from unlikely patches and convey it in clear, plain
language, sometimes theatrical yet somehow measured and comforting. Davies
at 50-something can put you in mind of an earnest, wryly clever schoolboy
explaining hard things to his interested Mum.
None of this really explains his great and startling success as a popular
writer. His own research topics are arcane. The scandal in his eminence,
surely, is the suspicion that the crypto-theological loading of his titles
is what sucks in hundreds of thousands of readers who have never picked up
a calculator for any task more gruelling than totting up the weekly bills.
Here is a scientist in good standing whose books (when they are not called
The Forces of Nature or The Physics of Time Asymmetry by P. C. W. Davies)
have eerily New Age titles: The Cosmic Blueprint The Edge of Infinity God
and the New Physics The Mind of God and now The Fifth Miracle These titles
are not exactly misleading, since Davies has moved from atheism to a
religious understanding of the world - though not the kind you'd be likely
to hear at the local parish - via physics and now biology.
Yet they are at least somewhat disingenuous, all the way to the bank.
Dreaming up titles with this ambiguity makes a tasty parlour game: Crystal
Light Energy (on lasers), Maxwell's Demon! (on thermodynamics), The Shroud
of Turing (on artificial intelligence)...
Consider these remarks from The Fifth Miracle a title Davies presumably
chose or at least authorised. `I am not suggesting that the origin of life
actually was a miracle' (p. xxi). `Science rejects true miracles' (p. 52).
`For many scientists, biological determinism is tantamount to a miracle in
nature's clothing' (p. 219). But note the slipping and sliding. What
Davies means by `biological determinism' is not Creation Science, say, but
traditional deity-free reductionism.
If life formed by sheer accident, Davies is saying, that in itself is a
statistical miracle of biblical proportions. And if it happened because
the universe is congenial to life, then something wonderful awaits us in
the deepest equations: `a self-organizing and self-complexifying universe,
governed by ingenious laws that encourage matter to evolve towards life and
consciousness. A universe in which the emergence of thinking beings is a
fundamental and integral part of the overall scheme of things. A universe
in which we are not alone.'
Not alone? Davies means alien intelligence is likely elsewhere in the
cosmos, emerged without miracles and developed into its conscious estate by
Darwinian selection. But one would be excused at seeing our reprieve from
loneliness (reading between the lines only too easily) as the Hand if not
the Mind of God, reaching down to cup us in our apparent contingency, our
cosmic lack of meaning. Most non-scientific readers, I suspect, will take
spiritual succour from such words. Perhaps that is what Davies intends,
but his explicit claims are always carefully protected by provisos and
cautions.
Despite these concerns, the book is a very fine example of accessible
writing on new science. Davies has scoured the relevant journals, cites
each item sparingly but with pith, poses one intriguing argument against
another in a crescendo of logic and intellectual excitement. Life, we once
supposed, coalesced in a warm pond or thin organic soupy ocean on the early
earth, perhaps 3.8 billion years ago. Now that seems unlikely, and the new
prime habitats are infernal or celestial. Life might have started deep
beneath a crust relentlessly bombarded by ruinous debris from space - or
fallen from the heavens, in comet-borne spores or meteorites hurled up from
the surface of Mars, then more hospitable to life than our own poor smashed
planet.
The details of each alternative are fascinating and copious. Davies tells
his tale like a postmodern detective story with elective endings. That is
just, since it is plainly too soon to know not only how the story comes
out, but how it started, and where. Davies' own solution emerges at the
very boundaries of current theory. As well as spacetime and mass-energy,
he argues, information itself must be fundamental, creating altogether
distinctive kinds of causation until now overlooked by reductive science.
This means `accepting that information is a genuine physical quantity that
can be traded by "informational forces" in the same way that matter can be
moved around by physical forces.' It is a bold proposal, echoed in papers
only now emerging from quantum theorists and experimenters. I just hope it
doesn't lead to Paul Davies' next book being called Quantum Angels.
================================
Damien Broderick's next book is called Not the Only Planet an sf anthology
from Lonely Planet.
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