COSMIC JOY AND LOCAL PAIN

Musings of a Mystic Scientist. Harold
J. Morowitz. Charles Scribner’s Sons,
New York, 1987. 321 pp. $18.95.

Harold Morowitz is a distinguished Yale biophysicist and former master of Pierson College. He is also the author of two charming collections of essays: The Wine of Life and Mayonnaise and the Origin of Life. Morowitz spent his last sabbatical on a yacht docked off the West Maui mountains in Hawaii. In that yacht he produced a book that is wise, thoughtful and benign; he has brought Teilhard de Chardin up to date to argue that the laws of physics and evolution reveal the workings of a “plan or cosmic intelligence that somehow had us in mind.”

Morowitz arrives at his conclusion that it is “hard not to see design in a universe that works so well” after a crisp review for the general reader of the rules...

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