Fitness of the Cosmos for Life Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning~tqw~ darksiderg torrent

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Fitness of the Cosmos for Life: Biochemistry and Fine-Tuning
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Type.................: Ebook
Part Size............: 6,235,691 bytes

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This highly interdisciplinary book highlights many of the ways in which
chemistry plays a crucial role in making life an evolutionary possibility in the
universe. Cosmologists and particle physicists have often explored how the
observed laws and constants of nature lie within a narrow range that allows
complexity and life to evolve and adapt to their structures. Here, these
anthropic considerations are diversified in a host of new ways to identify the
most sensitive features of biochemistry and astrobiology. Celebrating the
classic 1913 work of Lawrence J. Henderson, The Fitness of the Environment, this
book looks at the delicate balance between chemistry and the ambient conditions
in the Universe that permit complex chemical networks and structures to exist.
It will appeal to a broad range of academics interested in the origin and
existence of life in our universe.

Table Of Contents

List of contributors page vii
Foreword: The improbability of life
George M. Whitesides xi
Preface xxi
Acknowledgments xxiii
Part I The fitness of “fitness”: Henderson in context
1 Locating “fitness” and L. J. Henderson 3
2 Revisiting The Fitness of the Environment 20
3 Isfine-tuning remarkable? 31
4 Complexity in context: the metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory 49
5 Tuning fine-tuning 70
Part II The fitness of the cosmic environment
6 Fitness and the cosmic environment 97
7 The interconnections between cosmology and life 114
8 Chemistry and sensitivity 132
9 Fitness of the cosmos for the origin and evolution of life: from biochemical
fine-tuning to the Anthropic Principle 151
Part III The fitness of the terrestrial environment
10 How biofriendly is the universe? 169
11 Tuning into the frequencies of life: a roar of static or a precise signal?
197
12 Life on earth: the role of proteins 225
13 Protein-based life as an emergent property of matter: the nature and
biological fitness of the protein folds 256
14 Could an intelligent alien predict earth’s biochemistry? 280
15 Would Venus evolve on Mars? Bioenergetic constraints, allometric trends, and
the evolution of life-history invariants 318
Part IV The fitness of the chemical environment
16 Creating a perspective for comparing 349
17 Fine-tuning and interstellar chemistry 366
18 Framing the question of fine-tuning for intermediary metabolism 384
19 Coarse-tuning in the origin of life? 421
20 Plausible lipid-like peptides: prebiotic molecular self-assembly in water 440
21 Evolution revisited by inorganic chemists 456
Index 491

Product Details

* ISBN: 0521871026
* ISBN-13: 9780521871020
* Format: Hardcover, 501pp
* Publisher: Cambridge University Press
* Pub. Date: November 2007

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