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ABOVE: “Great Black Bull,” Painted Gallery of Lascaux II in Montignac, Lascaux, France, Credit: Serge De Sazo/Rapho.
RIGHT: Historical artwork of the heads of Galapagos finches, made by Charles Darwin, A Naturalist's Voyage, London 1889, Credit: SPL/Photo Researchers, Inc.
|  | The recognition that the universe is fine-tuned for life has been primarily an argument from physics, highlighting the role that the fundamental laws of physics play in preparing the universe for the organic chemistry on which life is based. Gravity, for example, is the force which holds stars together and drives the creation of the chemical building blocks of life. The physics of stars includes the possibility that they die by exploding, a process that spreads their rich chemistry throughout space, where it can be incorporated into planets like Earth. If such planets have stable orbits around long-lived stars, like our sun, life will have time to emerge. But the planet also has to be just the right distance from its sun for water to exist in liquid form, yet another requirement for life.
All this relates to the physics of the universe. Physics, however, as the most “fundamental” of the sciences, focuses on the simplest and most basic laws of nature. As one works their way “up” from this basis, we encounter the laws of chemistry, biochemistry, and finally biology. The creative ladder that leads to life may rest on a foundation of physics, but it reaches upward into biology, and maybe even beyond. There are many steps on the ladder from atoms to life, and many processes by which the simple grows ever more complex. What is the nature of these processes? Are they, like the laws of physics, surprisingly “friendly” to life? Ninety years ago, Lawrence J. Henderson, Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard University, pioneered research on this question. His seminal volume, The Fitness of the Environment, highlighted the many unusual properties of water that made life possible, from floating when it froze (to protect life in the seas) to dissolving so many toxins (to carry wastes from the body). Like Wheeler’s unanswered question about how we get “It from Bit,” Henderson’s question about how “It” gives rise to life remains unanswered. It is a deep question and one that biochemistry is just beginning to explore. Henderson suggests that the universe is finely tuned for life at all levels of the mysterious ladder that leads from physics to biology: “The whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric.”
In a gathering reminiscent of the Wheeler celebration, Henderson’s legacy was highlighted at Harvard in a major scientific conference in October, 2003, chaired by Owen Gingerich and Charles Harper. Leading physicists, chemists and biologists from around the world presented research papers examining the route that nature took from atoms to life, looking for tell-tale signs of directionality and “design.” Participants included George Whitesides, Martin Nowak, Jack Szostak, Guy Oriesson, John Barrow, Paul Davies, Christian de Duve, Simon Conway Morris, Harold Morowitz, Edward Oakes, and others.
The Henderson conference was the first step in the development of a multimillion-dollar research grants program funded by the Foundation. The goal of the ambitious program is to extend the Cosmology and Fine-Tuning program into the realm of biochemistry.
A key presentation at the Henderson meeting was that of Georgetown University theologian John Haught, whose God After Darwin represents one of the most thoughtful and effective reconciliations of evolutionary science and the Judeo-Christian doctrine of creation. The presence of Haught at this meeting was not incidental, but rather represents, in a nutshell, what the Foundation is most eager to explore, namely the exciting possibility of convergence in scientific and religious views of the world.
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