Rating: 
Summary: Honesty Shines Through
Review: After reading a number of writings by scientists who lean towards an intelligent designer and also a number by those who support blind chance as a maker, I find that there seems to be a certain ring of "sincere honesty" to be found among the former, whereas the sheer speculation and real lack of suporting evidence for evolution leaves the latter in a position that almost makes forces them to seem dishonest in there theories. The Privileged Planet reflects this honesty to which I refer.Some have dismissed the Anthropic principle, reversing the reasoning to support evolution, yet, if the chances are that because of the sheer number of possible planets in the universe, life had to arise on one of them that was perfect for life (Earth) in an unguided way, then would it not also be reasonable to think that in a biologists perfect laboratory (out of all the labs worldwide) that a living cell could be developed from scratch (even with a highly intelligent designer and his technology). This has not happened in recent decades and doesn't seem likely it will happen in the anywere near future. A human being in full bloom with his conciousness and mental ability is a completely different matter. Honesty will have to lead us to accept the absolute neesessity of a designer
Rating: 
Summary: Unscientific view of the Universe
Review: At first this book appeared to be a follow up on the "Rare Earth" hypothesis and had a lot to offer until the third section in which it turns away from science and presents an idea that has no justification. The book then becomes a rambling mess inspired by religion more than science and fails to convince the reader of the idea that habitability and measurability are related in the universe. Unfortunately the Notes are nearly as long as the book. Rather than just contain references they contain a substantial portion of the material forcing the reader to flip back and forth several times per page. There are more than the usual number of errors in the writing as well as the material. I cannot recommend this book to anyone with a scientific or historical interest in the universe.
Rating:
Summary: Racist Reaction to Enlightened Science
Review: Guillermo Gonzalez (an astronomer) and Jay W. Richards (a theologian), in their book The Privileged Planet, attempt to convince us that the planet Earth is in a privileged position in the Universe-and that it is so because it is "intelligently designed." Without getting into the poverty of the whole ID reaction to enlightened science, we can judge this book on its own. Except for a few trivial "in passing" notes on "biodiversity," the astronomer and theologian never mention biology. Instead remaining fixated on Earth's location in the galaxy, like a couple of real estate agents chanting, Location, location, location. The authors reject the notion of panspermia (343-345). Panspermia is the idea that life came to this planet from somewhere else in space, either in chunks of rock (meteorites) or in specks of dust (comet tails). They argue that the odds of organic material A) surviving the expulsion from a planetary body into space; and B) the survival of same in space, are vanishingly small. Between the heat and shock of ejection and the radiation of space, nothing, they argue, could survive. They're probably correct. But The Privileged Planet is marked by deep flaws, namely an ingrained anthropocentrism and a lack of imagination. Because of Earth's position in space, they say, "Mankind is unusually well positioned to decipher the cosmos" and that "the conditions allowing for intelligent life on Earth also make our planet strangely well suited for viewing and analyzing the universe" (x). In other words, our place on Earth gives us the ability to judge the rest of the Universe, and Gonzales and Richards find it lacking in the conditions they deem necessary for intelligent life. If there is intelligent out there, they argue, it'll be just like us: it will... enjoy a clear vantage point for searching the cosmos, and maybe even for finding us" (xi). Why this assumption that intelligent life will necessarily be looking outwards? Is human intelligence really the only possible measure of intelligence in the Universe? Isn't it possible that other forms of intelligence-and I'm thinking of something specifically introverted or inwards-looking-could exist out there?
This lack of imagination, and its correlative anthropocentrism, is similar to the idea that pervades histories of science and philosophy in general: forget the ancient Chinese, the ancient Indian, the ancient cultures of the Pacific and the Americas: science and philosophy started with the Greeks. Why? Because their science and philosophy are like "ours". Gonzalez and Richards betray this bias when they write that "a planet in a giant molecular cloud in a spiral arm might be a good place to learn about star formation and interstellar chemistry, but observers there would find the distant universe to be hidden from view. In contrast, Earth offers surprisingly good views of the distant and nearby universe while providing an effective platform for discovering the laws of physics" (xii-xiv). No doubt "the laws of physics" are important, but is discovering such laws the only criteria for intelligence? A race of beings in a spiral arm as Gonzalez and Richards describe might not be scientists at all: they might be poets, endlessly inspired by the spiraling clouds of gas that lit their skies. This isn't just a lack of imagination, though: it's also racism. For if the criteria of "intelligent life" is, as they claim, knowing the laws of physics and being able to make scientific discoveries, then what of many cultures here on Earth? Consider the few remaining speakers of Mura, a language family of the rainforest peoples of Amazonia. Consisting of only a few phonemes, a handful of consonants and only three vowels, these indigenes know nothing of our physics. Are they not, then, intelligent life? By the criteria set for in The Privileged Planet, the answer has to be no. Yet the indigenes of Amazonia know more about rainforest botany than anyone on Earth. Most of the stars astronomers have observed, they correctly point out, are red dwarfs, cold and inhospitable to life, while the Sun, with its relatively stable light output, is in fact rare, not, as commonly believed, small and average. True enough, but this neglects the fact that most red dwarfs passed through the Main Sequence on their way to their present condition; in other words, at some point in the past, such stars would have been, for a period of billions of years, similar to our Sun. Their argument seems to hinge on the idea that life in the Universe must all be co-temporal; if it doesn't exist in the conditions present in the Universe now, then it doesn't exist.
Their anthropocentrism centers on the conditions for life, using Earth, and Earth's position in the Solar System, as a normative model. Perhaps for carbon-based life forms this is so, but it is possible that truly alien forms of life exist. The value of science fiction is in expanding the mind. We need only recall the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which a silicon-based life form on an arid planet toxic to human life, and which described humans, once the crew of the Enterprise, brilliant exo-linguists that they are, figured out what the creatures were saying, called humans "Ugly bags of mostly water," to realize that the Universe is stranger than we can possibly imagine. The hubris of Gonzalez and Richards is in assuming that their minds can indeed wrap around all that is possible. But their minds can't even wrap around the possibility of the different kinds of intelligence right here on Earth-and they don't even mention biology. So how can they be trusted to inform us of "intelligent design" in the Universe? They can't. The Privileged Planet is a thinly disguised racist tract. It's only possible value is to provide ammunition for those who would oppress and exterminate cultures here on Earth with different lifeways.
Rating:
Summary: I don't get it
Review: How does a studied understanding of the universe given us by cosmologists deny the possibility of god's hand behind it all? Why wouldn't god use the tools of the universe he created in its origin and outcome? In short, why the need to create from no evidence something as execrable as this book? Read the Elegant Universe by Brian Greene if you want to see our latest understanding of god's handiwork.
Rating:
Summary: Opening a New Front for ID
Review: I first heard Guillermo Gonzalez present his ideas about our place in the universe being designed to facilitate scientific discovery at a conference at Yale in the fall of 2000. For me this was the high point of the conference. Jay Richards and Guillermo have since developed this idea, providing numerous lines of evidence to show that without a host of contingent facts being just-so, our scientific understanding would be impossible or severely attenuated. The idea that the world and features of it are designed to help us understand the world and those features constitutes a remarkable insight. Gonzalez and Richards apply this insight mainly at the level of cosmology and astrophysics. But it promises to apply also in biology. Indeed, some preliminary work in the bioinformatics literature is suggesting that biological systems contain information of no functional use to the organism as such, but information that is useful to the investigator in examining the organism and trying to understand it. The Privileged Planet breaks new ground. Einstein found it incomprehensible why the world should be comprehensible. Gonzalez and Richards begin to provide an answer to Einstein's perplexity.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic and informative
Review: I got this book as soon as it became available, so I thought I'd be the first one to write a review. I've followed the debates over design and fine tuning for a while, and had heard this book was in the pipeline. I am thoroughly impressed with the clarity of its argument, the elegance of its prose, and the staggering level of scholarship displayed in its pages. I have no doubt that it will raise the level of debate on the larger issues about the meaning of it all. The book is richly illustrated with both color and black and white pictures. Gonzalez and Richards' (G and R) argument is something that, so far as I know, has not really been discussed before, namely, that the universe is fine-tuned for scientific discovery itself. This is a completely new angle. But the book is more than an argument for purpose in the universe. In fact, in many ways, it's a sweeping overview of the history of scientific discovery itself. I would like to say something about the Publishers Weekly review that is posted on Amazon.com. It's baffling. I thought Publishers Weekly reviews were supposed to be more or less descriptive rather than editorial. But this review must have been written by someone who either didn't read The Privileged Planet carefully, or didn't understand the argument. First of all, the description of their treatment of habitability is inaccurate. G and R don't claim that Earth is the only habitable planet. They argue that, given what we already know about what it takes to make a habitable planet, such planets are probably rare. And they definitely don't argue that just because the Earth is well suited for life, therefore it was designed. In fact, they go to great lengths to show why that's not a very good argument. The reviewer also misunderstood the central point of the book, or what the authors call "the correlation between habitability and measurability." In fact, the review turns the very thesis of the book into an afterthought: "In addition, the authors contend, the universe itself is designed for discovery." Huh? That's the point of the book, and it is developed and reiterated many times, so I don't know how a reviewer could miss it. The argument is fairly straightforward: the (universal) requirements for complex observers like human beings also provide the best (overall) places for making scientific discoveries. In other words, observers (embodied observers, anyway) will find themselves in the best places for making various significant kinds of scientific discoveries. Some of their examples, like eclipses, are, frankly, a little eerie. The rarity of conditions for complex life is one of the premises of their argument for purpose, but it's not the only premise. Finally, the Publishers Weekly reviewer warns readers "that the vast majority of scientists reject the intelligent design argument." Why would that be in a review? Did the reviewer poll all scientists? And which intelligent design argument is he referring to? There's more than one. In the ancient world there was Plato's, Cicero's and Thomas Aquinas'. In the 19th century, there was William Paley's. In recent years, there have been design arguments from Michael Denton, Michael Behe and William Dembski in biology, to John Barrow, Frank Tipler, John Leslie, and others in physics. The argument in The Privileged Planet is related to these arguments, but it is also different. Even those who are critical of design arguments in biology might like the argument in The Privileged Planet, since it has to do with the design of the universe as a whole, and not with individual items within the universe. It's most related to the fine-tuning arguments in physics, but it deals with a new class of evidence. I don't think their argument would differ if Darwin's theory of evolution were true in all its details. In any case, the book should be judged on its own merits, and not just lumped in with a generic and somewhat dismissive phrase like "the intelligent design argument." Finally, how can a reviewer make bald assertions about the general reception of an argument which isn't even known yet? (The Publishers Weekly review came out before the book was even available at Amazon.com.) Is he clairvoyant? I do hope that readers will read the book for themselves. And I also hope that future reviews will be more careful in how they describe this important and inspiring book.
Rating:
Summary: Who'll like it better? The astronomer or the historian?
Review: I have looked forward to this book and it exceeded my expectations. It is dense, but carefully worded AND readable.
It contains over a dozen frontpieces and illustrations of books from Copernicus onward (including a page of Copernicus's Latin that was readable). The illustrations are so clear that one can do some primary research to evaluate the author's claims! Shortcomings??? The 68 pages of endnotes contains so much more than just references, that they should have been footnotes. Overall??? A Tour de Force. Remarkably the day I got the book, I found an article (dated 2/12/04) on the SETI subweb of space.com by Peter Backus where he states
"Many believed the Earth was the center of the universe and that humans were in some way 'higher' than all other creatures. Then along came the Copernican revolution four centuries ago, and suddenly Earth shifted out of the center of the universe to take up its true position among the planets in our solar system." Egads!!!, over three years after Dennis Danielson gave the plenary presentation too the AAS debunking the Copernicus myth, we have a SETI officer marching around on a myth. I joined the Racine Astronomical Society when I was thirteen (1973) and a few years later I went to a day long seminar on SETI. The optimistic picture of those days is quite different from the current state of research.
I have often asked myself if I was duped back then and I feel that the answer is no. There was a lot of guessing, but it was good faith guessing. Looking at the SETI material today, my answer would be different. I hope proponents of ET come to grips with this remarkable book and interact with the vast amount of science and history it contains. Do it for the sake of the 13 year olds out there!
Rating:
Summary: Complex, provocative, interesting and useful
Review: I looked at the posted reviews before writing my own. The vast majority (more than half) rate the book at five stars. Does this prove that this is the greatest book ever written? Of course not. It is simply a result of the adage that "you will like this book, if this is the kind of book that you like." The next largest category is a rating of one star. And what does that prove? It proves that "you will not like this book, if this is the kind of book that you do not like." Apparently this book is not as simple, or as obvious as either group would tell you. In fact, I found this book to be quite complex, if one read it (or should one say, "studied") the book carefully. I would say that one has here three, or possibly four or more, "books" combined in one. First we have a book of "scientific information or facts." I found no criticism of these facts in the one star ratings. The facts are clear, complete, well reasearched and well referenced for those who wish to look further. Clearly this "book" deserves a five+ star rating. Another book is based on the "choice of facts to present." Some people may be unhappy that facts they would include, are excluded. Is this a problem? Only if you disadgee with the clear intent/agenda of the authors. There is nothing hidden here. The authors make it clear where they stand respecting the origin, and purpose, of life. One can disagree that life has a creator or designer. But that is a different premise that the one chosen by the authors. Given their premise. I would argue that the authors chose just the right science to present and to exclude. A third book involves "conclusions" derived from the presented facts. The idea that our planet is privileged to both our kind of life and also to scientific discovery, and the corolary that the requirements for both are intertwined, is intriguing. Nevertheless, I must say that I am not completely convinced respecting privilege in scientific discovery but the supporting material is 100% convincing respecting our kind of life. A fourth book, if one will, involves various conclusions respecting what one might call orthodox intelligent design. Here is where prior biases and ideas will make a big difference, ranging from a perfect five to an insignificant one. I happen to believe in a "designer" but am not a full supporter of orthodox ID, especially with respect to evolution theory. So what? Does one have to agree with the ultimate conclusions of a book to find it interesting, intriguing and even fascinating? Indeed, the readers who gave the book a one star rating, primarily because they do not believe in a "designer," still found a wealth of ideas and facts to consider - if only to reject. I would say that this is a must read whether you support or reject the ultimate conclusions because this book will make you think. And thinking is always a good thing.
Rating:
Summary: A puddle thinks its hole is well-designed.
Review: I'm the daughter of a manual laborer and from a Yankee family who takes a "no crap please" view on life (brother in the Army, parents still married and Republican). That said, I'm going to let you know that I'm one of those "elite scientists" you're hearing about in the reviews above. In fact, I'm a bioinformaticist with a biophysics background. You don't have to be an "elite scientist" to recognize that something is silly. Think carefully -- a puddle finds itself in a hole, and thinks the hole was perfectly designed for it alone (Douglas Adams first used that comparison). There is no objective way we could talk a puddle out of thinking that its hole is perfectly designed, because there is no other examples of other holes the puddle's water finds itself in to compare. But any hole a puddle finds itself in will seem perfectly designed because that puddle moves out to settle into the hole under physical principles. That's all. I'm one of those bioinformaticists mentioned in a review above, and I spend a lot of time poking around genomes, professionally. We are NOT finding hints of design in DNA. We have not found evidence of design in molecular biological systems. We find a cobbled-together system that operates in a much less than smooth way that is jury-rigged for redundancy in some parts, terribly balanced in other parts. All those common, genetic, or environmental human diseases you know about have to do with weaknesses or flaws in the human "design". Books like this are slick one-overs on a purchasing public. who are still desperately trying to find a purpose for life by using science (something scientists are themselves wrongly accused of). Don't be fooled by a careful analysis of the puddle/hole fit. It looks good, but find out why the puddle fits so well -- don't be hoodwinked by glorious descriptions and half-baked truths. Go out and get a science education yourself and ask questions, read a lot, and pay attention to people who have no books to sell you. To paraphrase my Gramps, if someone tries to sell you a pretty platter of crap, remember that it's still crap.
Rating: 
Summary: Not that helpful
Review: I've read this book and have heard Jay Richards speak. My analysis is that the authors are putting a new spin on an old argument. It is worth the read if you're interested in keeping up with the ID movement. Otherwise, don't bother. The 'new science' presented is interesting and there certainly are reasons to believe that earth is a special place. Whether this means that we are the only special place is not 'proved' in anyway by this book. Also, whether or not we really are privileged seems to me to be theologically irrelevant.
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