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Type of bind: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 576.83
EAN num: 9780684863092
ISBN number: 068486309X
Label: Simon & Schuster
Manufacturer: Simon & Schuster
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 304
Printing Date: March 16, 2000
Publishing house: Simon & Schuster
Sale Popularity Level: 223799
Studio: Simon & Schuster
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Product Description:
ARE WE ALONE IN THE UNIVERSE?
In his latest far-reaching book, The Fifth Miracle, internationally acclaimed physicist and writer Paul Davies confronts one of science's great outstanding mysteries -- the origin of life.
Three and a half billion years ago, Mars resembled Earth. It was warm and wet and could have supported primitive organisms. If life once existed on Mars, might it have originated there and traveled to Earth inside meteorites blasted into space by cosmic impacts?
Davies builds on the latest scientific discoveries and theories to address the larger question: What, exactly, is life? Is it the inevitable by-product of physical laws, as many scientists maintain, or an almost miraculous accident? Are we alone in the universe, or will life emerge on all Earth-like planets? And if there is life elsewhere in the universe, is it preordained to evolve toward greater complexity and intelligence?
On the answers to these deep questions hinges the ultimate purpose of mankind -- who we are and what our place might be in the unfolding drama of the cosmos.
Amazon.com Review:
How did life begin? Did it start here, by blind chance or by necessity, or was Earth seeded by extraterrestrial visitors? (And, if so, how did they arise?) Physicist and science writer Paul Davies tackles these heavy questions and more in The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life, a wide-ranging survey of the field of biogenesis. From the 'Martian meteorite' ALH84001 to the hardy microorganisms living on--and under!--our sea beds, Davies looks for evidence pointing toward our very first ancestor. His willingness to consider any possibility makes for a fun, fascinating journey through our solar system and beyond.
The Fifth Miracle provides convincing arguments that life flourishes, and may indeed have begun, deep within the earth's crust, and not in Darwin's 'warm little pond.' And if in our planet's crust, why not in others'? Indeed, he shows that it is not just possible but likely that living organisms have passed between Earth and Mars embedded within meteorites. Davies's command of the data and his facility with explaining it to nonprofessionals give the lie to his self-description as 'a simple-minded physicist' intruding in another's domain. The best scientists hate to see questions finally answered and love to see new ones raised; by that standard (and by any other), The Fifth Miracle is a first-rate book of scientific speculation. --Rob Lightner
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Rated by buyers 
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This is an excellent book. It introduced me to the scientific fields of Abiogenesis (the creation of life from the inanimate) and Biogenesis (the creation of life from other lifeforms).
Did you ever ask yourself these questions: "Was there a common ancestor to all lifeforms? How was this common ancestor like?", or better yet: "How did this very first lifeform come to life? Was there a moment where inanimate substance became alive? Can we reproduce this exact moment that creates life from scratch?".
The book rises these and other fascinating and intriguing scientific questions on the reader's mind and describes some research done on these subjects.
If you're into science, don't miss this book - you'll adore it.
Rated by buyers -
This book is very, very good - an excellent read.
It most certainly is a in-depth look at 'age-old' questions of "where did it all begin?" and with absolute neutrality regarding current scientic views versus current religious 'creator' views.
Rated by buyers -
How did life on Earth originate?
Wisely Davies begins his book by answering this question with the question of what is life? After discussing various theories that have been previously proposed, Davies concludes that it's an organicly autonomous creation sometimes capable of obtaining and metabolizing food and creating copies of itself.
Having dealt with this question, Davies examines the three so far discovered domains of life on Earth: prokaryotes (us and pretty much every organism we've actually ever seen), bacteria, and archea...an ancient form of life living in extreme planetary environments such as ocean volcanic vents and hot water pools. Unlike the other two domains, archea live in environments that have largely unchanged in the past four or so billion years of Earth's history. Therefore, Davies reasonably concludes that they have most retained their original forms basically living off sulfur and or methane.
In this last particular, archea display an unusual quality for life by actually making their living off of inorganic matter.
In this way, Davies advances a possible terrestrial origin of life.
Likewise, Davies also discusses the possible extra terrestrial origins that have been proposed for Earthly life: from space and from Mars. As to the spacely origins theory, Davies notes the abundance of comets with organic matter in them. As to the Martian origins theory, Davies notes the fact that for its very first billion years or so, Mars had both liquid water and an atmosphere.
Significantly, during that same time on Earth, life not only arose or was transferred but had propogated into at least two different domains. It is for these reasons, Davies believes that life indeed once existed on Mars.
Tantalizingly, Davies also discusses the discovery of ALH80001, one twelve Martian metiorites discovered in the Antarctic. Unlike its peers, this meterite showed possible evidence of fossilized Martian life. Wisely agnostic about whether this meteriorite really was itself evidence of Martian life, Davies' discusion of it nonetheless is thorough and thought provoking.
Davies was also thought provoking in discussing the Urey Miller experiments of 1953 wherein amino acids were artificially synthesized under experimental conditions. At that time, the experiements thought maybe they were just days from synthesizing life itself.
However, as noted by Davies, the gap between the bricks of amino acids and the houses of DNA and RNA still elude the efforts of modern science. Still the same, like all great science, the question is a fascinating one to ponder and well worthy of our attentions.
Although life is but the fifth miracle listed by God in the Bible at the time creation according to Davies, it stands as a primary miracle for those who enjoy having it.
Rated by buyers -
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.
Rated by buyers -
This book is my Science recommendation for 2004. As usual Davies ploughes through a whole whack of cosmic data and implications to look at the question of life: How did it begin? What are the current theories of life? What are the necessary conditions for life forms.
It is interesting to note that all of these questions are pre-evolution questions, since we do not need a mechanism to add, refine or make life more complex -- natural selection does that wonderfully --- the central question of life is how did it arise in the most simplest of organisms.
In this wonderful read, Davies analyses very first the physics of life, entropy, open systems and thermodynamic equilibrium. It is this approach that Davies uses that I find personally so fascinating since it is one that is often ignored by a lot of chemists and biologists, but is it germane -- what kind of physical properties are necessary in the universe for life to arise? This is a real good qustion and Davies gives us a good intro tour of the how complexity can arise in an environment which always seems to be striving towards thermodynamic equillibrium.
The second part of the book could be called the biochemical reasons necessary for life. Here Davies looks at elementary organisation and gives us a really good history of the experimentation in this area, from the elementary forces that may be required to bring about nucleotides, proteins and polypeptide strings.
One really interesting thing Davies does is trace back the evolutionary history of organisms and the current data that evolutionary forces were at work for almost 4 billion years. From this he describes ancestors from this time that may still be living on the earth (meso/thermophilic bacteria). A really great way of looking at evolution.
The last chapters sort of synthethise the physics and chemistry parts and look at the implications of the planetary forces, both gradual and catastrophic over the history of the earth and their potential to influence the rise of life and shape the evolutionary forces.
There is a lot of food for thought here and of course no one knows how life started, but it is clear that current theory and evidence are making science more interesting than even before. We may never know as Davies states, but in knowing more and more we are attaining the best goals of mankind.
A wonderful book with science as the only aim.
It should be stated that Davies has no political axe to grind with anyone and his writing is ideologically clean. But let there be no misunderstanding, when in doubt there is no evoking of blind forces in any or Davies books. His passion is science and reason and, like most people who think deeply, he regards the constant state of unknowing as a challenge as a never ending challenge.
For the person who says that Davies is not "open-minded" because he does not consider (notice I did not say believe) that a omnipresent God waved his hand and made us... that is simple. Personal belief has nothing to do with science since it yields nothing of benefit to Science. Even if Davies did personally believe that a God created life, that does not get anyone closer to understanding life... And this is the fundemental point that people who believe in Gods (or as with the current fashion, intelligent design) as ulimate cause fall into --- intelligent design, even if right is not science, it cannot be proved. It is a sterile end on the path of unknowing.
Thank God for people like Davies that can remind us that Science alone can yeild truth -- that it will never yield all of the truths is the central tenet of Science... and with that there is comfort, because it means that reason remains paramount, and man advances.
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