New Scientist ran a brief article highlighting Fred Adams’s work, casting doubt on the popular notion that the universe is specially fine-tuned for life.

Work done by Adams or Vic Stenger tends to show that when a wide range of cosmological parameters are varied, achieving conditions for complexity is not that amazing. I don’t want to over-emphasize this, since I think that the fine-tuning argument for an intelligently designed universe is an exasperatingly bad piece of reasoning even in the absence of such considerations. Nonetheless, anything that hammers against the utter lack of imagination intelligent-design proponents represent is helpful indeed.