Table of Contents
Foreword: The improbability of life George M. Whitesides
Part I. The Fitness of 'Fitness' - Henderson in Context: 1. Locating 'fitness' and Lawrence J. Henderson Everett Mendelsohn
2. Revisiting The Fitness of the Environment Owen Gingerich
3. Is fine-tuning remarkable? John F. Haught
4. Complexity in context: the metaphysical implications of evolutionary theory Edward T. Oakes
5. Tuning fine-tuning Ernan Mcmullin
Part II. The Fitness of the Cosmic Environment: 6. Fitness and the cosmic environment Paul C. W. Davies
7. The interconnections between cosmology and life Mario Livio
8. Chemistry and sensitivity John D. Barrow
9. Fitness of the cosmos for the origin and evolution of life: from biochemical fine-tuning to the Anthropic Principle Julian Chela-Flores
Part III. The Fitness of the Terrestrial Environment: 10. How biofriendly is the universe? Christian de Duve
11. Tuning into the frequencies of life: a roar of static or a precise signal? Simon Conway Morris
12. Life on earth: the role of proteins Jayanth R. Banavar and Amos Maritan
13. Protein-based life as an emergent property of matter: the nature and biological fitness of the protein folds Michael J. Denton
14. Could an intelligent alien predict earth's biochemistry? Stephen J. Freeland
15. Would Venus evolve on Mars? Bioenergetic constraints, allometric trends, and the evolution of life-history invariants Jeffrey P. Schloss
Part IV. The Fitness of the Chemical Environment: 16. Creating a perspective for comparing Albert Eschenmoser
17. Fine-tuning and interstellar chemistry William Klemperer
18. Framing the question of fine-tuning for intermediary metabolism Eric Smith and Harold J. Morowitz
19. Coarse-tuning the origin of life? Guy Ourisson
20. Plausible lipid-like peptides: prebiotic molecular self-assembly in water Shuguang Zhang
21. Evolution revisited by inorganic chemists R. J. P. Williams and J. J. R. Fraústo da Silva
Index.
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