On this week’s episode we look at what the Anthropic Principle does and does not tell us.  Can it really explain how we got here, or just that we are here?  Don’t ever forget how much God loves you! “The anthropic answer, in its most general form, is that we could only be discussing the question in the kind of universe that was capable producing us.  Our existence therefore determines that the fundamental constants of physics had to be in their respective Goldilocks zones.”  Richard Dawkins, 2006, The God Delusion, Bantam Press “Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck, anthropically justified.  For example, my collegue, Mark Ridley in Mendel’s Demon has suggested that the origin of the eukaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and statistically improbable step than the origin of life.  The origin of consciousness might be another major gap whose bridging was of the same order of improbability.”  Richard Dawkins, 2006, The God Delusion, Bantam Press “One-off events like this might be explained by the anthropic principle, along the following lines.  There are billions of planets that have developed life at the level of bacteria, but only a fraction of these life forms ever made it across the gap to something like a eukaryotic cell.  And of these, a yet smaller fraction managed to cross the later Rubicon to consciousness.  If both of these are one-off events, we are not dealing with a ubiquitous and all-pervading process, as we are with ordinary, run-of-the-mill biological adaptation.  The anthropic principle states that, since we are alive, eucaryotic and conscious, our planet has to be one of the intensely rare planets that has bridged all three gaps.”  Richard Dawkins, 2006, The God Delusion, Bantam Press “Once the initial stroke of luck has been granted – and the anthropic principle most decisively grants it to us – natural selection takes over: and natural selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.”  Richard Dawkins, 2006, The God Delusion, Bantam Press “As ever, the thiest’s answer is deeply unsatisfying, because it leaves the existence of God unexplained…A God capable of calculating the Goldilocks values for the six numbers would have to be at least as improbable as the finely tuned combination of numbers itself, and that’s the very improbable indeed.  This is exactly the premise of the whole discussion we are having.  It follows that the theist’s answer has utterly failed to make any headway towards solving the problem at hand.  I see no alternative but to dismiss it, while at the same time marveling at the number of people who can’t see the problem and seem genuinely satisfied by the Divine Knob-Twiddler argument.” Richard Dawkins, 2006, The God Delusion, Bantam Press  “…many people have not had their consciousness raised, as biologists have, by natural selection and its power to tame improbability…Biologists, with their raised consciousness of the power of natural selection to explain the rise of improbable things, are unlikely to be satisfied with any theory that evades the problem of improbability altogether…Let’s turn, then, to the anthropic alternative.”  Richard Dawkins, 2006, The God Delusion, Bantam Press 

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