Barrow, John D.; Morris, Simon Conway; Freeland, Stephen J.; Harper, Charles L.

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

List of contributors vii Foreword: The improbability of life xi George M. Whitesides Preface xxi Acknowledgments xxiii Part I The fitness of ``fitness'': Henderson in context Locating ``fitness'' and L. J. Henderson 3(17) Everett Mendelsohn Revisiting The Fitness of the Environment 20(11) Owen Gingerich Is fine-tuning remarkable? 31(18) John F. Haught Complexity in context: the metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory 49(21) Edward T. Oakes Tuning fine-tuning 70(27) Ernan McMullin Part II The fitness of the cosmic environment Fitness and the cosmic environment 97(17) Paul C. W. Davies The interconnections between cosmology and life 114(18) Mario Livio Chemistry and sensitivity 132(19) John D. Barrow Fitness of the cosmos for the origin and evolution of life: from biochemical fine-tuning to the Anthropic Principle 151(18) Julian Chela-Flores Part III The fitness of the terrestrial environment How biofriendly is the universe? 169(28) Christian de Duve Tuning into the frequencies of life: a roar of static or a precise signal? 197(28) Simon Conway Morris Life on earth: the role of proteins 225(31) Jayanth R. Banavar Amos Maritan Protein-based life as an emergent property of matter: the nature and biological fitness of the protein folds 256(24) Michael J. Denton Could an intelligent alien predict earth's biochemistry? 280(38) Stephen J. Freeland Would Venus evolve on Mars? Bioenergetic constraints, allometric trends, and the evolution of life-history invariants 318(31) Jeffrey P. Schloss Part IV The fitness of the chemical environment Creating a perspective for comparing 349(17) Albert Eschenmoser Fine-tuning and interstellar chemistry 366(18) William Klemperer Framing the question of fine-tuning for intermediary metabolism 384(37) Eric Smith Harold J. Morowitz Coarse-tuning in the origin of life? 421(19) Guy Ourisson Plausible lipid-like peptides: prebiotic molecular self-assembly in water 440(16) Shuguang Zhang Evolution revisited by inorganic chemists 456(35) R. J. P. Williams J. J. R. Frausto da Silva Index 491