The Miracle of Man

THE MIRACLE OF MAN

THE MIRACLE

OF MAN

THE FINE TUNING OF NATURE

FOR HUMAN EXISTENCE

MICHAEL DENTON

SEATTLE               DISCOVERY INSTITUTE PRESS               2022

Description

For years, leading scientists and science popularizers have insisted humans are nothing special in the cosmic scheme of things. In this important and provocative new book, renowned biologist Michael Denton argues otherwise. According to Denton, the cosmos is stunningly fit not just for cellular life, not just for carbon-based animal life, and not even just for air-breathing animals, but especially for bipedal, land-roving, technology-pursuing creatures of our general physiological design. In short, the cosmos is specifically fit for creatures like us. Drawing on discoveries from a myriad of scientific fields, Denton masterfully documents how contemporary science has revived humanity’s special place in nature. The human person as revealed by modern science is no contingent assemblage of elements, an irrelevant afterthought of cosmic evolution, Denton writes. Rather, our destiny was inscribed in the light of stars and the properties of atoms since the beginning. Now we know that all nature sings the song of man. Our seeming exile from nature is over. We now know what the medieval scholars only believed, that the underlying rationality of nature is indeed ‘manifest in human flesh.’ And with this revelation the... delusion of humankind’s irrelevance on the cosmic stage has been revoked.

Copyright Notice

© 2022 by Discovery Institute. All Rights Reserved.

Library Cataloging Data

The Miracle of Man: The Fine Tuning of Nature for Human Existence by Michael Denton

256 pages, 6 x 9 x 0.6 in. & 0.9 lb., 229 x 152 x 15 mm & 0.4 kg.

ISBN-13: Paperback: 978-1-63712-012-5, Kindle: 978-1-63712-014-9, EPub: 978-1-63712-013-2

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022935635

BISAC: SCI036000 SCIENCE/Life Sciences/Human Anatomy & Physiology

BISAC: SCI019000 SCIENCE/Earth Sciences/General

BISAC: SCI015000 SCIENCE/Space Science/Cosmology

BISAC: TEC056000 TECHNOLOGY & ENGINEERING/History

Publisher Information

Discovery Institute Press, 208 Columbia Street, Seattle, WA 98104

Internet: discoveryinstitutepress.com

Published in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

First edition, first printing, May 2022.

ADVANCE PRAISE

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

In his new book Michael Denton contributes a highly original new approach to the teleological design argument. Previous approaches either focused on evidence for design in the unlikely conditions of the physical constants and laws of the universe or on unlikely complex phenomena in biology. Here Denton shows that the intricate properties of light, carbon, water, air, fire, and metals all are contributing to a unique prior environmental fitness of nature for human biology, which suggests that the universe is not just fine tuned for any life but was specifically designed for us and our cultural and technological development. Indeed, Denton provides powerful scientific evidence for theism and anthropocentric human exceptionalism that are at the core of the Judeo-Christian worldview. We are not insignificant accidents of nature and not the cosmic orphan. Denton provides the scientific underpinning for a theistic real humanism far beyond the nihilistic implications of so-called secular humanism. This book deserves to become a game changer that will spark a new enlightenment and re-enchantment of the cosmos in the twenty-first century.

—Günter Bechly, PhD in paleontology, Eberhard-Karls University of Tübingen; Scientific Curator from 1999-2016 at the State Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart, Germany; Senior Fellow of the Center for Science and Culture

The Miracle of Man is a masterful summation of Michael Denton’s work. For the last several years he has been making the case that nature is uniquely suited—prepared in advance, as it were—to permit creatures with our physical characteristics to exist. This book brings it all together: If the characteristics of light, the sun, water, oxygen, and carbon were not precisely as they are, we would not exist. If our atmosphere were different, or our planet’s location and composition, life as we know it could not exist. This may seem a trivial argument, but it is not. Rather than say that hey, we are suited for the environment because we are adapted to it, we must also admit that, seen from the other side, the precise chemical properties of the elements, formed in the fires of creation, were pre-adapted to permit creatures like us—air-breathing, high energy, bipedal and terrestrial, with our basic physiology. The very chemistry of life seems to have been designed for us! Read this book if this hypothesis sounds absurd or trivial—the weight of the evidence may change your mind.

—Ann Gauger, PhD, biologist, Senior Fellow at the Center for Science and Culture, and co-author of Science and Human Origins

Michael Denton’s The Miracle of Man is a tour de force and should feature prominently in future debates on whether humans are here on Earth by accident, as Darwinian materialism holds. This book makes clear the question is now settled, and the answer is no. We are no accident. Here is a medical doctor and biochemistry PhD with a breadth of knowledge stretching from physiology and chemistry to physics and anatomy. He cites an incredible number of well-established facts that show that Earth along with physics and chemistry were a perfect fit for human beings. Numerous facets are finely tuned and exacting, like an exquisite, fine glove that fits perfectly, a glove with a million plus fingers of all shapes, sizes, and textures. This is beyond coincidental. I like the Yogi Berra quote here: That’s too coincidental to be a coincidence.

—Geoffrey Simmons, MD, former Governor of the American Academy of Disaster Medicine (AADM), and author of What Darwin Didn’t Know and Billions of Missing Links

In this amazing book, Dr. Michael Denton shows scientifically that nature is remarkably fit for life. Not just for life in general, but for us in particular. He describes many ensembles of fitness that work together to support human life and technology. The result is awe-inspiring.

—Jonathan Wells, PhD, biologist, Senior Fellow at the Center for Science and Culture, and author of Icons of Evolution, The Myth of Junk DNA, and Zombie Science

Michael Denton’s singular achievement is to integrate the vast corpus of scientific knowledge of human physiology into a readily comprehensible coherent narrative. Along the way he reveals our existence to be a natural miracle, governed by nature’s immutable laws of the physics and chemistry of the elements of which we are made but whose combination together—and fine tuning for their purpose—lie so far beyond the realms of chance they might be termed miraculous. A powerful testimony to there being more than we can know.

—James Le Fanu, FRCP, physician and author of Why Us?: How Science Rediscovered the Mystery of Ourselves

Some years ago, Michael Denton and I stood in the surf of one of California’s spectacular beaches. I asked him, Do you suppose the salinity levels of the earth’s oceans are calibrated to foster an environment specially fit for human habitation? Let me look into it, he said. A few weeks later, he wrote in reply that there is indeed evidence that oceanic salinity matters to conditions for human existence and flourishing.

After reading this survey of natural history, which prepares the way for natural theology, you’ll understand why I trust Michael Denton for answers to this sort of question. And you’ll wonder why today’s scientists are so slow to acknowledge that our terrestrial environment is exquisitely fine tuned. (Denton has wise things to say about that, as well.)

Michael Denton has compiled a resume of stunning elements in the total ensemble of fitness, and shown how the significance of each is even greater in the aggregate than it is in isolation. All of this stands ready to be observed, understood, and used by us, so the natural world and the built world are seamlessly integrated through a cognitive process exploited by humans. We can be grateful for Denton’s wide-ranging curiosity and for his technical skill, both as a highly versatile scientist and as a remarkably accessible writer. The Miracle of Man is a stunning achievement and a wonderful capstone to his life’s work.

—R. Douglas Geivett, Professor of Philosophy, Talbot School of Theology, Biola University

In this marvelous book, Dr. Denton completes an epic journey through a stunning landscape of scientific discovery to arrive at the grand finale: nature’s startling fitness for humankind. There are the fundamental particles that constitute our bodies—from carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, and oxygen to various metal elements—each finely tuned to serve very precise biological functions. There is that supernaturally fine-tuned molecule of life, water, whose suite of unique properties allows it to sustain life’s biochemistry and also drive the life-essential hydrological cycle. There is carbon dioxide, which warms our planet and serves indispensably in the respiratory and circulatory systems. There are the crucial atmospheric gases, including O3, for filtering sunlight to protect us; lightning that allows nitrogen to react with oxygen to form our proteins; and much more.

The book also touches on the wonders of the cell, and of blood and its masterpiece of a molecule, hemoglobin. Denton looks at fire and the exquisite fine tuning of the laws of physics. All of these serve man unusually well and, to my mind, suggest a miracle and more than a miracle—an intelligent mind who very much had us in mind when the cosmos came into being. That is, the universe was designed to conspire in our favor.

The Miracle of Man is a comprehensive and most convicting review of the relevant data, a survey urging any reasonable person to consider that we humans were foreseen, were planned from the beginning. The author does not insist on such a conclusion, and some of his readers may choose not to go there, but Denton’s powerful new volume makes one thing undeniably clear: the data has delivered its verdict—nature is arrestingly fit for man. We are indeed, a most privileged species.

—Marcos Eberlin, PhD, member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, former President of the International Mass Spectrometry Foundation, founder of the Thomson Mass Spectrometry Laboratory, winner of the prestigious Thomson Medal (2016), and author of Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose

Denton backs his staggering claim that the universe is uniquely fit for us with a staggering weight of evidence. The search for strange forms of intelligent life elsewhere can stop now. If we find our equals somewhere else in the universe, they will have to be very much like us.

—Douglas Axe, Maxwell Professor of Molecular Biology at Biola University, and author of Undeniable: How Biology Confirms Our Intuition That Life Is Designed

CONTENTS

ADVANCE PRAISE

1. INTRODUCTION

After 1543

After Darwin

A Reconnection and a Second Revolution

Prior Fitness versus Adaptive Complexity

The Human Heart

Complex Adaptive Wonders

From the Start

2. PRIOR FITNESS: THE HYDROLOGICAL CYCLE

Three Material States

Delivering the Elements

The Universal Solvent

By Freezing and Fracturing

Viscosity

Glaciers

A Wondrous Synergy

Soil

Clay

Providence

A Stunning Ensemble

Design Implications

Teleological Hierarchy

3. FITNESS FOR AEROBIC LIFE

Complexity Requires Oxygen

Sunlight

The Atmosphere

The Atmospheric Gases

The Right Proportions

The Greenhouse Gases

Vital Coincidences

Light and Air

4. PRIOR FITNESS: THE ATMOSPHERE

Lungs versus Gills

Oxygen Being Gaseous

Thin Air

Regulation

Spontaneous Combustion

The Retardant

Safe Combustion and Respiration

Nature Expected Us

5. BREATHING

Our Lungs

The Density of Air

Atmospheric Pressure

Viscosity

The Compressibility of Air

Diffusion

Fick’s Law and the Interface

Ultrathin

Area

The Right Volume

From First Principles

Just Right

6. CIRCULATION

The Fitness of Water

Physiological Determinism

The Right Volume

No Conceivable Alternative

7. WARM-BLOODED

Cold-Blooded Adaptations for Warming Up

Water’s Thermal Properties

Water: The Gift of Terrestrial Endothermy

8. OXYGEN: DELVING DEEPER

One Electron at a Time

Cytochrome c Oxidase

The Fitness of the End Products

The Bicarbonate Buffer

Saving the Best for Last

9. THE RIGHT PROPORTIONS

Muscles

Determinants of Muscle Strength

The Right Proportion

Nerves

Prior Fitness

The Brain

Ultimate Complexity

Bones

The Eye

A Privileged Place

10. FIRE AND METAL

Fire

Metallurgy

Wood

Photosynthesis

Charcoal

The Right Temperature

Electricity

Magnetism

Metal Ore Formation

Before Prometheus

The Twenty-First Century

Uniquely Fit

11. THE FIRE MAKERS

Hands and Arms

The Right Size

The Right Size Planet

The Right Inertia

In Sum

12. THE END OF THE MATTER

Oxygen Redux

Water Redux

The Right Proportions

Fire Makers

Prior Fitness: The Blind Spot

In the Depths of Nature

ENDNOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

FIGURE CREDITS

INDEX

1. INTRODUCTION

There is, however, one scientific conclusion which I wish to put forward as a positive, and I trust, fruitful outcome of the present investigation. The properties of matter and the course of cosmic evolution are now seen to be intimately related to the structure of the living being and its activities; they become, therefore, far more important in biology than has been previously suspected. For the whole evolutionary process, both cosmic and organic, is one, and the biologist may now rightly regard the universe in its very essence as biocentric.

—Lawrence Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment (1913)¹

THE YEAR 1543 WAS ONE OF THE MOST FATEFUL IN THE HISTORY of Western civilization. It was not a great battle or some dramatic shift in the balance of power on the continent of Europe. No great natural disaster was noted. No new king was crowned. But two events occurred that year, the seismic consequences of which were unimaginable at the time.

One of these set in motion an intellectual revolution that would displace man from the central place in the order of the cosmos, a place he had occupied for the previous two thousand years. The discovery would transform Western thought.²

In the spring of that year, the astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus lay ill in his native Poland waiting to receive from his publisher in Nuremberg the first copy of his work De Revolutionibus. The work contradicted long-established conventional wisdom by identifying the sun, and not the Earth, as the center of the solar system, delivering what many came to see as a profound challenge to the established worldview of the Christian West, one that since classical times had been both geocentric and anthropocentric.³ It was a worldview immortalized in Dante’s Divine Comedy and self-confidently displayed on the grand astronomical clocks that adorned the facades of public buildings and cathedrals in the medieval period.⁴

Also in the spring of 1543, Andreas Vesalius, a young anatomist from the leading Italian medical school of the day, was overseeing publication of his seven-volume anatomical masterpiece, De Humani Corporis Fabrica, among the most influential works on human anatomy ever published, and marking a quantum leap forward in efforts to accurately depict the various organ systems of the human body, work based for the first time on dissection of human cadavers rather than inference from the anatomy of animals. De Fabrica along with a handful of similar anatomical texts of the period revolutionized our knowledge of the human body and laid the foundations of modern scientific biology.

Neither Vesalius’s work, nor Copernicus’s, it should be noted, reveals the slightest connection between man and cosmos, between biology and cosmology, or any hint that man might occupy a special and preordained place in the cosmos, as was universally assumed before 1543.⁵ Russian medievalist historian Aron Gurevich beautifully describes the older view that was being displaced:

The effort to grasp the world as a single unified whole runs through all the medieval summae, the encyclopedias and the etymologies… The philosophers of the twelfth century speak of the necessity of studying nature: for in the cognition of nature in all her depths, man finds himself.... Underlying these arguments and images is a confident belief in the unity and beauty of the world, and also the conviction that the central place in the world which God has created belongs to man… The unity of man with the universe is revealed in the harmony interpenetrating them. Both man and the world are governed by the cosmic music which expresses the harmony of the whole with its parts and which permeates all, from the heavenly spheres to man. Musica humana is in perfect concord with musica mundana [the music of the universe].⁶

Indeed, so intensely anthropocentric was their vision of the world order, Gurevich explains, that each part of the human body corresponded to a part of the universe: the head to the skies, the breast to the air, the stomach to the sea, the feet to the earth; the bones corresponded to the rocks, the veins to the branches of trees.

After 1543 that vision of reality began giving way to another. It isn’t just that Copernicus’s heliocentric model displaced Earth from the center of the cosmos. If one sets his work beside Vesalius’s and peruses both, little if any hint of a unity between man and cosmos can be found, either by studying each work separately, or by comparing them. So, for instance, the chaotic tangle of blood vessels depicted by Vesalius stands in striking contrast to the circular perfection of the orbits of the planets as depicted by Copernicus. (See Figure 1.2.)

It was this shocking disconnect between man and cosmos—shocking in the context of a civilization that had assumed for centuries that the universe was specially ordered for human existence—which posed the basic challenge to the established conception of the cosmos as a deeply interconnected whole, with life and humankind as its end and purpose.

The effect, according to Stephen Dick, was to plunge European thought into a crisis from which it arguably has not yet emerged.⁷ The psychological shock was immense. As Alexandre Koyré comments in his classic From the Closed World to the Infinite Universe, man lost his place in the world, or, more correctly perhaps, lost the very world in which he was living and about which he was thinking, and had to transform and replace not only his fundamental concepts and attributes, but even the very framework of his thought.⁸ As the poet John Donne lamented, the new philosophy Puts all in doubt... Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone.⁹

After 1543

JUST OVER half a century after De Revolutionibus, the Italian philosopher and mystic Giordano Bruno envisaged an infinite universe, replete with planetary homes like Earth peopled by alien beings, stretching endlessly in time and space. For this heresy (and for certain occult beliefs) he was condemned by the Inquisition, and on February 17, 1600, in Rome’s Campo de’ Fiori, he was burned at the stake. But the martyrdom of Bruno could not save the human-centered medieval cosmos. Already at the beginning of the seventeenth century, the first intimations of the current secular zeitgeist were already emerging, and Western man was already launched on the long journey to the nihilism of the twenty-first century.

In 1610, ten years after Bruno’s death, Galileo Galilei designed and built a telescope and then turned it toward the night sky. He saw for the first time that the other planets of our solar system were indeed worlds like the Earth, and that one of these constituted an analogue in miniature of the solar system—Jupiter as a sort of mini sun and its group of moons orbiting it like so many planets. In observing the stars he also noted that many more could be seen through his telescope than with the naked eye. This led to further radical possibilities, that the stars were suns like our own but immensely far away and perhaps infinite in number. These observations, reported in 1610 in Sidereus Nuncius, another landmark publication in astronomy, lent Bruno’s hypothetical possibility of many worlds empirical traction.

Now Earth was not only not the center of things, it was but one of a myriad of similar bodies possibly infinite in number. And man was perhaps just one type of intelligent being among a potential infinity of alternative forms. By the opening of the seventeenth century, the depictions of a human-centered cosmos on the medieval clocks already seemed hopelessly dated. Over the next century the growing divorce was reinforced by further advances in astronomy and biology, which provided not the slightest hint of any connection or correspondence between the two fields—between physics and biology, between man and cosmos.

The circulation of the blood described in William Harvey’s De Motu Cordis,¹⁰ and the tiny organisms observed by the seventeenth-century microscopists, illustrated in Robert Hooke’s Micrographia,¹¹ did nothing to heal the rift. The microscope and telescope revealed two far-apart domains and provided no hint of the medieval vision of a cosmos where all things were purposefully interconnected.

The