Anthropic principles

The notion of the inevitability of life appears to be present in science in many forms. In my opinion the anthropic principle, for example, belongs in this category. This can be expressed in different ways but the basic idea is that the universal constants, the geometric parameters, and all things of the universe are the way they are in order for life and evolution to develop (Barrow and Tipler, 1986 and 1988 Davies, 1999 Barrow, 2001 Carr, 2001). It is the post hoc argument that since we are so improbable, our presence must signify a purposeful universe. 

The anthropic principle can be expressed in more sophisticated forms, but I believe that my simplihcation given above is not at all far from the target. In fact, one reads in the primary literature, for example in Paul Davies book (Davies, 1999) ... 

This view is held, although not always expressed as an adherence to the anthropic principle, by several authors in the field. For example Freeman Dyson (1985) writes ... 

The argument of the anthropic principle - that the great laws of nature are the way they are otherwise there would be no life - is a truism at many levels. If one considers the atmosphere, there would be no life if there were more oxygen, or less oxygen or a higher temperature, or a lower one or less humidity, or more humidity, etc. The same is true in the molecular world. Of course if on Earth there had only been diketopiperazines and not amino acids or if sugars did not have the size they have or if lipids were three times shorter, then we would not have life. 

The assumption that our proteins have something special from the energetic point of view, would correspond to a strict deterministic view that claims that the pathway leading to our proteins was determined, that there was no other possible route. Someone adhering strictly to a biochemical anthropic principle might even say that these proteins are the way they are in order to allow life and the development of mankind on Earth. The contingency view would recite instead the following if our proteins or nucleic acids have no special properties from the point of view of... 

In which we encounter Einstein, Rumi, God, the anthropic principle, Stephen Hawking, the Bible, Proust s hyper-realities. The Lobotomy Club, Sushi Never Sleeps, acto/5, brain surgery, Italian filmmaking, neorealism, stellar nucleosynthesis, the Big Bang, Paul Davies, Frank Tipler, Marcel Proust, H. P Lovecrafi, Andrei Linde, Sir Fred Hoyle, Rudy Rucker, Robert Jastrow, The Templeton Foundation, multiple universes, Paul Kammerer, synchronicity, and the shoreless sea of love. 

Yes. We exist because of cosmic coincidences, or more accurately, we exist because the seemingly finely tuned numerical constants permit life. Some people who believe in the anthropic principle believe these numbers to be near miracles that possibly suggest an intelligent design to the Universe. 5... 

Quoted in John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler The Anthropic Cosmological Principle The Anthropic Principle and Biochemistry (p. 541)... 

I suppose that everybody starting with this contradiction between these views on time would have gone in the same direction. What are the alternative possibilities Einstein said that we are automata but we don t know that we are automata and time is an illusion. Other people, like Descartes or Kant, stated that we are in a dualistic universe. Even in current literature, like in Hawking s A Brief History of Time, you find this duality. On the one hand, it is stated that the universe can be understood geometrically, while, on the other hand, there is the anthropic principle, which introduces evolution. My main point is to go beyond this duality and to reach a unified view by extending the theory of dynamical systems. 

Despite the abundant evidence for huge plume events, such as the immense Bushveld event, the anthropic principle implies that the whole Earth has not experienced 2>100°C greenhouse conditions as long as life has existed. Since then, there have always been parts of the Earth below about 100°C, and since the evolution of mesophiles there have been parts of the Earth below about 40°C. Possibly the plume events have simply been too small to disrupt global climate beyond habitability. Or possibly life itself has played a hand. 

In 1913, long after Charles Darwin had argued for the htness of organisms for their environment, the Harvard chemist Lawrence J. Henderson pointed out that the organisms would not exist at all except for the htness of the environment itself. Fitness there must be, in environment as well as in organism, he declared near the outset of his classic work. The Fitness of the Environment (1913, p. 6). While most of Henderson s contemporaries ignored the philosophical implications of this work, as John Barrow and Frank Tipler have noted, it still comprises the foundahon of the Anthropic Principle as applied to biochemical systems (1986, p. 143). 

Carter, B. (1974). Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology. 

McMullin, E. (1993). Indifference Principle and Anthropic Principle in the history of cosmology. Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 24, 359-9. 

Linde, A. (2003). Inflation, quantum cosmology, and the anthropic principle. In Science... 

B. Carter. Large number coincidences and the anthropic principle in cosmology. In Confrontation of Cosmological Theories with Observational Data, International Astronomical Union Symposium No. 63, ed. M. S. Longair. Dordrecht Reidel (1974), pp. 291-8 also The anthropic principle and its implications for biological evolution. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, A310, 347 (1983). 

Fitness of the cosmos for the origin and evolution of life from biochemical fine-tuning to the Anthropic Principle... 

---