The Atheist's Guide to Reality_ Enjoying Life Without Illusions - Alex Rosenberg [146]
Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory (1993) reveals the inevitability of quantum mechanics’ and general relativity’s take on reality, while explaining the difficulty physicists face reconciling them. If you read one of Greene’s books first, you’ll come away optimistic about physics’ eventual ability to do so.
Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time (1998) doesn’t tell us what we need know to understand time: how the second law of thermodynamics makes it and every other one-way process work. But Sean M. Carroll has done the job in From Eternity to Here (2010). Hawking’s later book, however, The Grand Design (2010, with Leonard Mlodinow), sketches the multiverse theory and explains why physicists have no time for the “Why is there something rather than nothing?” question or its Goldilocks answer, the “anthropic principle.”
HOW PHYSICS FAKES DESIGN
The single best guide to Darwinian natural selection and its key features is Richard Dawkins’s aptly titled The Blind Watchmaker (1986). Dawkins has written many books that combine important scientific originality with great accessibility. But the one supplement to this book particularly worth reading is The Ancestor’s Tale (2004), in which evolutionary history is traced back from our species all the way to the primeval slime. The book is a long tour through details that are fascinating in themselves and that leave no doubt that Darwin was the Newton of the blade of grass.
Daniel Dennett’s magisterial Darwin’s Dangerous Idea (1995) settles most of the latter-day controversies within evolutionary biology and among its fellow travelers. This book has done more even than Dawkins’s to reveal how Darwin’s theory is a universal acid that eats through all cant (as well as Kant) about nature. But don’t trust the last three chapters, where Dennett tries to prevent the acid from eating through our values.
“The Heavy Hand of Entropy,” Chapter 2 of Sean Carroll’s From Eternity to Here, already praised, is a great introduction to the second law of thermodynamics for purposes of biology as well as physics.
Thermodynamic randomness makes molecular self-assembly possible, and with it the emergence of adaptation from zero adaptation. Self-assembly is an idea pioneered by Stuart Kauffman, a serious scientist with a knack for popularization. In At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (1995), he develops these notions in a way that nonphysical scientists can grasp. Why he thinks self-assembly is an alternative to Darwinian processes of order production remains unexplained.
The websites of the nanotechnologists give vivid examples of how molecules, especially DNA molecules, can self-assemble into almost any shape under the sun and therefore into shapes that replicate themselves. To find the most up-to-date pictures (some lab is always coming up with a better picture), just Google “DNA cube.” While you’re online, you can even find Lord Kelvin’s scientific screed against Darwin by searching “On the Age of the Sun’s Heat.”
The Wikipedia site for the Miller-Urey experiment has a nice diagram of its setup, a clear explanation of the results, and the even more impressive results of a reanalysis of their original data 56 years later. Turns out Urey and Miller actually synthesized 22 amino acids, not the 5 they originally thought. The Internet has many other diagrams and photos of the original experiment and the others it inspired.
IKEA DIDN’T MAKE NATURAL HISTORY
Humans have 24,000 genes. Fruit flies have 14,000. And they are pretty much the same ones. One startling discovery of the last 20 years is how a small number of differences in the number and arrangement of the same gene sequences produce the incredible range of diversity and complexity in living things. Peter Lawrence gives the details in The Making of a Fly (1992). How complex adaptations arise from zero adaptation just through random minor changes in molecular biology is obvious but breathtaking. How this works in many other species is reported in Sean B. Carroll