Dean L. Overman

About the author: Dean L. Overman is a lawyer who has taught at the University of Virginia. The author of several books, he was appointed as a visiting scholar at Harvard for the purpose of writing his latest book, A Case Against Accident and Self-Organization.

The answers to three significant questions impact upon the issue of the origin of life. The questions are: Does mathematical possibility favor the chance formation of life? If mathematically impossible, were there other possible causes? Could chance have caused the formation of a universe in which life could exist? Since the answer to each of these questions is no, we should look beyond the physical sciences for information about the origin of life.

Many people today believe that life on Earth originated as a result of random accidents. Most of us vaguely...