Mysterious beginnings
The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and Meaning of Life.
By Paul Davies. Simon & Schuster, 304 pp.
What kind of book is Herman Melville's Moby Dick? Is it a book about whaling? In some ways it is—full of empirical information on the subject. Is it a novel about the perennial mystery of evil and its impact on the human spirit? It is that too.
Readers may wonder in a similar way about the kind of book Paul Davies has written. It is marketed as a popular science book, and is written by a distinguished physicist (winner of the 1995 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion). It surveys the state of scientific knowledge on the question of life's origin. Davies leads the reader on a lively journey through thermodynamics, "the primordial soup," information science, molecular biology, the possibilities of life in the cosmos, hypotheses about life originating in hot volcanic vents on the ocean floor or in our planet's bedrock several miles below the earth's crust, life on Mars, and the possible transmission of life-producing forms between planets, particularly Mars and Earth.
