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Rigorously defining the concept of design, discerning criteria to detect it, and applying those criteria to real-life examples, are interesting intellectual exercises. It's fun to know why you judge one event to be random, and another to have been purposefully directed. But what if you get more than you bargained for? What if you find that not only is the tulip bed designed, but so is the tulip? What if all the world's a stage—with a real set designer?

These are questions unexpectedly confronting science at the end of the millennium. Dean Overman's fine book, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization, compiles many of the features of the universe and life that fit the criterion of specified small probability: highly improbable arrangements that function to permit life. The book is conceptually divided into two parts: the intractability of the problem of the origin of life, and the "fine-tuned" physical features of the universe. Let's reverse that order and first discuss the fine-tuning of the universe.

In the nineteenth century, the cosmos seemed a rather featureless place and matter was pretty bland stuff. For all science could tell, the universe—even the earth itself—had always been there and always would be. As James Hutton observed in a textbook of the time, there were no signs of a beginning nor prospect for an end. But all that has changed. The electron, proton, and neutron were found to be hiding in matter, and ever-more exotic subatomic particles have been teased out of the nucleus in this century. In the 1920s light coming from distant galaxies was discovered to differ in wavelength from earthly light. This was interpreted as showing that galaxies are racing away from each other, as if in the aftermath of a gigantic explosion—the Big Bang.

The heavier elements (those with more protons than helium) were shown to originate in the nuclear processes of stars, and to be released in the catastrophic explosions of supernovas. By the middle of the twentieth century, the universe was a decidedly complicated place.

In the mid-1970s, the physicist Brandon Carter published an article entitled "Large Number Coincidences and the Anthropic Principle," first pointing out that the universe is suspiciously suited to foster life. Since then, as Overman cites, other physicists have agreed. For example, Stephen Hawking writes: "The remarkable fact is that the values of [the charge on the electron and the ratio of the masses of the proton and the electron] seem to have been very finely adjusted to make possible the development of life." The Oxford mathematician Roger Penrose has calculated the precision necessary to set up a universe like ours: "This now tells us how precise the Creator's aim must have been: namely to an accuracy of one part in 10^10123. This is an extraordinary figure. One could not possibly even write the number down in full, in the ordinary denary notation." One part in 10^10123 is a very small probability indeed, and specified for the occurrence of life.

Living things also have turned out to be considerably less likely than science first thought. Under midnineteenth-century microscopes, the cell looked like a nearly featureless glob, and Ernst Haeckel declared it to be a "simple little lump of albuminous combination of carbon," not much different from a microscopic piece of Jell-O. Scientists of the age thought that such a simple thing might just spontaneously pop up from sea mud.

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