ABSTRACT

This chapter will discuss an analog between an aspect of two ne-tuning examples from cosmology and an aspect of biological function in which water is a major actor. The biological example is the stability of a folded, native protein against its unfolded state in its normal aqueous environment. This comparison suggests a property of water for which numerical values are critical to this aspect of biological functionality in a way that has a parallel in the cosmological cases. This will not demonstrate that no other molecule could perform in a similar way to water in this situation, but it does underline how critical the small difference between two large numbers can be in the biological as well as in the cosmological case. Whether these values are ne-tuned, in the case of water, or merely aspects that evolution has been able to take advantage of, remains a matter of speculation.