Neville mentions a small filler column he read in the previous day's New York Times, tucked beside a department-store advertisement, poking fun at flying-saucer speculation. The column cited Sir John Eccles — the neurophysiologist who won the Nobel Prize in 1963 for his work on the brain — arguing that of the hundreds of millions of planets in the universe, only Earth could plausibly sustain something as extraordinary as the human brain, and that physicists speculating about extraterrestrial life have no standing in questions of biology. Neville uses the column to reinforce his own teaching that Earth, and the human brain in particular, is the singular, precious site of God's creative experiment.