The online premiere this week of the documentary Privileged Species, featuring Discovery Institute geneticist Dr. Michael Denton, calls for some special comment. We have all heard too often that human beings are a mere speck in a cosmos that never cared about us. The argument seems to be of a piece with the view that we are an accident of nature that didn’t have to be, that could have been something else, or might have been nothing at all. In a very large way, this documentary film stands in contrast to that “Don’t mind me — I’m nothing” viewpoint. Denton reveals the breathtaking fact that carbon, oxygen, and hydrogen — among the very first atoms the universe produced — have exactly the right properties to enable beings like us to exist.

At first hearing, that simple statement may not sound like much, but Denton points out coincidence upon coincidence upon coincidence — wheels within wheels — that reveal these three elements to be interlocking pieces of a giant matrix, all fine-tuned not just for life, but for large, high-metabolism, active, atmospheric oxygen-breathing beings like ourselves. The nature of water, including but not limited to its heat storing capacity and its action as a universal solvent; the extraordinary chemical capacities of carbon for building organic structures like DNA, tree trunks, and the transparent wings of a dragonfly; the properties of oxygen that permit sunlight through to reach the plants that make the oxygen we breathe, the amount of oxygen in the atmosphere that’s in the right amount to permit high energy metabolism like ours — I could go on, but you should watch the film yourself.

What all this implies is that from the very beginning, the universe was established in such a way that a planet like ours would form, and that its chemistry would be exactly what was needed to support life like ours. Watch Privileged Species. You’ll see the world and your place in it with new eyes. Here it is, free now via YouTube.

For those who want to know more, you can read Denton’s article in BIO-Complexity, “The Place of Life and Man in Nature: Defending the Anthropocentric Thesis,” where he details these lines of evidence plus others as well.