[.ca] The Biological Universe: The Twentieth Century ... (ISBN 052166361X)

From Amazon.com:
As biological scientists learn more about how terrestrial life was formed, they increasingly turn to the stars to ask whether life might have evolved elsewhere. Thus far, despite a recent flurry of interest in Mars, they have found no solid evidence, but they keep looking. This scholarly book, written by a historian at the U.S. Naval Observatory, examines the long development of that quest, along with some of the philosophical questions that have emerged from it. Steven J. Dick notes that our observational abilities are both limited and biased, and that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence forces us to examine some of our own assumptions about what constitutes life in the first place.

A paradigm-setting study:
This book is subtitled "the twentieth century extraterrestrial life debate and the limits of science." In fact, it is more than that. Science historian Stephen Dick describes a new paradigm of the universe that integrates biology. Where once we seemed lost in a vast and empty Cosmos, now we can credibly argue that we may be part of a living universe. Dick sets the stage by surveying the debates over the existence of life and intelligence beyond the Earth up to the beginning of the 20th century, seeing the extraterrestrial life debate as a struggle for a world view that has advanced in stages. He connects the plurality of worlds with the decline of anthropocentrism, describing the latter as one of the major intellectual changes of the past century. He then describes how Percival Lowell's theories about Mars demonstrated the limits of astronomical observation. He goes into scientific theories about the origins of planets before discussing images of extraterrestrials in literature and the arts. Dick takes on the UFO controversy in an admirably objective way. He reviews scientific theories about the origin and evolution of life before describing the modern search for radio signals known as SETI. Dick argues convincingly that we have seen the birth of a new science: astrobiology. He concludes by discussing some of the implications of possible future contact with an extraterrestrial civilization. In his summary, he describes the triumph of an evolutionary view of the Cosmos, and the emergence of the biological universe as a worldview. This is a basic work for any serious student of the extraterrestrial life issue.