M.C. Escher’s “Phosphorescent Sea.”
© 2006 The M.C. Escher Company-Holland.
All rights reserved. www.mcescher.com

High-resolution imagery of Mars, 5.5°N latitude, 150°E longitude. Plate-like rotations are interpreted as pack-ice movement, thus indicating a frozen lake. Credit: Adapted by permission from Macmillan Publishers Ltd: Nature (Vol. 434), © 2005.

IS THERE PURPOSE IN THE COSMOS?
One such person the Foundation is working closely with to address purpose in the natural world is renowned Cambridge University evolutionary paleontologist Simon Conway Morris. His research has shaped and broadened our understanding of how life evolved on earth. Conway Morris is the author of several influential books, including, The Crucible of Creation, about the 520-million-year-old Burgess Shale, and, more recently, Life’s Solution, about the inevitability of human life on earth.

In 2005, Conway Morris joined the Cambridge Templeton Consortium, a new $5.5 million program designed to encourage scientific research pertinent to the “great debate” over purpose in the context of emerging biological complexity. The mission of the Consortium is to ask what new knowledge can be discovered about life if we ask what role, if any, purpose plays in the world. This is in contrast to what we’ve been able to learn through a study of life that begins with the assumption that purpose doesn’t exist, or that its study is somehow off limits to serious researchers. The Consortium is funding research addressing three specific sets of questions:

+ To what extent can arguments analogous to “fine tuning” in physics and cosmology be applied to chemistry and biochemistry? For example, is water, what biologist and Nobel laureate Albert von Szent-Gyorgyi called “life’s mater and matrix, mother and medium,” fine-tuned for life? Or are there alternative solvents other than water for the emergence and maintenance of life?

+ Within the field of evolutionary biology, is it possible to look at the entire evolutionary continuum and see purpose? Or is it purposeless? Also, is convergence of evolutionary importance?

+ Primarily within the fields of archaeology, how can we better understand the story of our emergence as a species and the development of the societies we have created? Called, “Becoming Fully Human: Social Complexity and Human Engagement with the Natural and Supernatural World”, this branch of the Consortium’s funding program seeks to understand what we can know about the religious or spiritual experiences of early Homo Sapiens. And is the spiritual sense a human universal or perhaps even more broadly found among other hominids?

After a rigorous peer review process, the Consortium picked 18 winners from among 150 applications worldwide. “There were a whole lot of applications which we thought were extremely good,” says Conway Morris. “But it wasn’t clear to us that they couldn’t be funded by a standard grantee. We were really looking for a mixture of flair, imagination and risk-taking. We’re very much throwing our bread on the water in this sort of exercise.”

While the intent of the Consortium is to fund grantees investigating purpose across a range of topics, the focus never strays from careful research. “Science is such a demanding goddess,” says Conway Morris. “She won’t let you waver at all from the empirical data and the fact that things have to be tested. But, of course, science is also an exploration of the unknown… Traditional science tends to be geared towards success around existing paradigms, but it’s a privilege of the Templeton Foundation for us to actually have the freedom to look a bit outside.”

For more about the Cambridge Templeton Consortium,
visit www.cambridge-templeton-consortium.org.

THE WORLD IN A DROP OF WATER
Continuing the Foundation’s interest in “fine-tuning”, it was only fitting that a symposium dedicated to understanding the mystery of water should be held on water, or at least overlooking it. In this case Villa Monastero, built on the foundations of a 13th century Cistercian convent, on the shores of Lake Como in Varenna, Italy.

In April 2005, the two-day “Water of Life” workshop was convened. It was modeled on the successful 2003 research symposium “Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry & Fine-Tuning”, which brought many of the finest scientists in the world together for a workshop at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics at Harvard University.

Both “Fitness of the Cosmos for Life” and “Water of Life” focused on the so-called “fine-tuning-for-life” question in physical chemistry and biochemistry. In the past, the “fine-tuning-for-life” question has been addressed within physics and cosmology, where it has become a major subject of research. Its success in those scientific domains begs the question of its potential usefulness in setting new, innovative, and possibly, far-reaching research agendas within the chemical and biological sciences. “We’re asking questions about the properties of water,” says Executive Program Director and core participant Charles Harper. “Is water in some sense biocentric? That’s a very interesting debate in chemistry.”

In his seminal 1913 work, The Fitness of the Environment, Lawrence J. Henderson, Professor of Biological Chemistry at Harvard University, pointed out that water possesses many remarkable and anomalous properties that seem essential to the very existence of life itself, from floating when it froze to its capacity for unusually high freezing and boiling temperatures.

But can it be said that water is “fine-tuned” for life? It’s not a trivial question, and it requires great care and scientific creativity to address. The overall success of the “Water of Life” symposium, and future research programs dedicated to this topic, such as the Cambridge Templeton Consortium, depend on taking a different approach in chemistry and biochemistry.

Over the course of two days, two dozen leading physicists, biologists, chemists and cosmologists from around the world joined Co-Chairs Ruth M. Lynden-Bell, Simon Conway Morris, and John Barrow to present research papers examining the question of “fine-tuning” as it relates to water and the birth of life. (For a full list of participants click here)

The “Water of Life” program offered an unusual challenge for scientists to envision newer and broader ways of exploring some of the really big questions in chemistry and biochemistry. Participants were encouraged to read, think and converse widely outside the domain of their own specialization. The long-term goal is to achieve sustained, advanced research leading to major progress in our philosophical understanding through the study of the biochemistry of water.

The event was concluded with a presentation by special guest Alister McGrath, Professor of Theology at Oxford University, whose three-volume work, A Scientific Theology, is a celebrated publication in the field of science and religion. His presentation titled, “Water: A Channel from Science to God? On Reconstructing Natural Theology” marked the bicentenary of the death of William Paley, widely regarded as the most significant advocate of natural theology and noted for his image of the “divine watchmaker.” Rev. Professor McGrath’s selection as the capstone address emphasizes the Foundation’s interest in gathering leading scientists and theologians together to open up, not simply another line of inquiry, but rather a meta-scientific question: Is there evidence of purpose in the cosmos? www.templeton.org/wateroflife