I'm down with that. For a really well rounded and thoroughly informed view, I recommend Ernst Mayr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr http://en.wikipedia.

I'm down with that. For a really well rounded and thoroughly informed view, I recommend Ernst Mayr (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ernst_Mayr). A Biologist and Philosopher, he really understood the foundations of "life as we know it" and what implications this has on our view of the universe. For instance he wrote some wonderfully insightful essays on the probability of intelligent life (maybe even just "l.a.w.k.i") on the grounds that most people misinterpret the products of strict evolutionary theory. He claimed that for il/lawki to have evolved one must posit the happenings of not just the simian evolutionary line, but all life and it's corresponding physical environment. If we take this literally, then we can say that for il/lawki, an unbroken line of events 13 billion years long are invested in the simple phrase "intelligent life" or "life as we know it"... and we need not restrict ourselves to any time period as it's a continuum, so we start to get an infinite on this side of the equation that divides the infinity of the universe into a simple and undeniable unity - us. To posit anything further than this is beyond the realms of scientific integrity.