The Miracle of Man

While there is a general awareness of the fine tuning of the various laws and constants of physics rendering our planetary home particularly well suited for intelligent life, Michael Denton describes an additional astonishing array of qualities demonstrating prior fitness for complex carbon-based, high-energy, metabolically efficient life that takes the fine tuning in a different direction and to an exceptional degree. He cleverly describes the amazing fitness of oxygen, nitrogen, and water in both the hydrological cycle and in the respiratory and circulatory system. He highlights some surprising and intriguing observations, such as the relationship between the tension in small blood vessels and their ability to withstand relatively high hydrostatic pressures courtesy of the counterintuitive characteristics of the law of Laplace. Denton describes not just amazing and specific adaptations but the surprising prior fitness of basic physics and chemistry, a peculiar challenge to any naturalistic explanation and reminiscent of remarkable foresight. Teleology is evident everywhere you look. -David Galloway, MD DSc FRCS FRCP FACS FACP; former President, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Glasgow; Honorary Professor of Surgery, College of Medical, Veterinary & Life Sciences, University of Glasgow Every important realm of science is worthy of continuing reevaluation. The idea that a field of inquiry is settled science and therefore must be excluded from scientific challenge is detrimental to science. In this spirit, I am happy to recommend Michael Denton's The Miracle of Man. While many science books on origins focus on the question of biological evolution, others on the first cell, and others still on fine tuning in physics and the birth of the universe, Denton's latest is refreshing in the attention it pays to the astonishing degree of fitness for advanced life manifest in chemistry. Forty-five years ago, my dear friend and Berkeley colleague, the late Phil Johnson (then on sabbatical in London), quizzed me on Denton's 1985 book. I enjoyed it and encouraged him to address his powerful intellect to analyze Denton's book. Phil's study of the Denton book was perhaps the first step in the development of the intelligent design movement. -Henry F. Schaefer III, PhD, Graham Perdue Professor of Chemistry and Director of the Center for Computational Chemistry at the University of Georgia; Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 'Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving.' Thus wrote the philosopher Bertrand Russell in perhaps the most spectacularly wrong-headed pronouncement of the twentieth century. Au contraire, in The Miracle of Man, Michael Denton gathers the voluminous evidence of modern science that shows the exact opposite: the universe precisely embodies the end for which it was built. -Michael Behe, PhD, Professor of Biological Sciences, Lehigh University; author of Darwin's Black Box, The Edge of Evolution, and Darwin Devolves If Lawrence Henderson's 1913 classic The Fitness of the Environment was volume 1, then Denton's 1998 Nature's Destiny should be considered volume 2. If one thinks that Denton completed the series with that work, one would be mistaken. In my opinion The Miracle of Man earns a well-deserved status as volume 3. Denton provides significant new examples of nature's prior fitness for mankind to support his anthropocentric thesis. -Guillermo Gonzalez, PhD, astronomer, astrobiologist, and co-author of The Privileged Planet