Fire-making and spoken language are the two artifacts of human culture that, more than any other, have made civilization possible. Charles Darwin himself recognized this, calling fire “Probably the greatest [discovery], excepting language, ever made by man.”
Speech, as Tom Wolfe explains in his brief, wonderful book The Kingdom of Speech, makes thought possible — abstract thought in particular, as Michael Egnor reminds us. Fire, as Discovery Institute biologist Michael Denton shows in any even briefer yet equally powerful new book, is the sine qua non of almost all advanced technology, that is, technology reliant on metallurgy. Both pose an extraordinary challenge to theories of unplanned, unguided origins.
It’s not by intelligent design but merely a happy coincidence that we announce today the release of Dr. Denton’s new book, Fire-Maker: How Humans Were Designed to Harness Fire and Transform Our Planet, precisely a week following the publication of Tom Wolfe’s latest. But the coincidence is still kind of remarkable. Wolfe argues, following Alfred Russel Wallace — co-formulator with Darwin of the theory of evolution by natural selection and, later, proto-intelligent design advocate — that the development of speech defies conventional Darwinian evolutionary theory and in fact reveals a hard limit to evolution.
Denton argues, also following in the footsteps of Alfred Wallace, that fire-making reveals the extraordinary precision with which the universe seems to have been planned for creatures like ourselves.
Together, Denton and Wolfe pack an eerily as-if-coordinated punch. Neither demands a conclusion of intelligent design, but both illuminate the strangeness and wonder of the set of circumstances — “adding fortuity to fortuity,” in Denton’s words — that permit the existence of civilization-building homo sapiens. Offering more detail than in the short documentary of the same name, released earlier this year and highlighting Denton’s ideas, Fire-Maker is available in book form and in Kindle format.
“The path, it seems,” writes Denton — an evidently unique path — “was already built into nature.”
And not only does the path appear to be unique, but only biological beings similar to modern humans, possessed of our android design and conscious creative agency on a planet similar to the Earth, could ever have exploited the wonderful fitness of nature for fire and for metallurgy.
The finely tuned elements of fitness include Earth’s atmosphere, the planet’s size, the “utility and availability of metals,” the availability of wood fuel, notably including the wood-product charcoal, the design of trees, man’s unique anatomy including our dexterous hands, our size and strength, nerve conduction, and more.
None of this is a matter of speculation, but of fact. It is all by accident? Wallace was doubtful. He said:
Is it…a pure accident that these metals, with their special physical qualities which render them so useful to us, should have existed on the earth for so many millions of years for no apparent or possible use; but becoming so supremely useful when Man appeared and began to rise towards civilization?
Fire-Maker is not only the perfect companion to Wolfe’s Kingdom of Speech. It’s also the first in a series of short book, The Privileged Species Series, by Dr. Denton. Watch here for further volumes!