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VI. The Anthropic Principle
(Anthropic comes from the Greek "anthropos" which means "man".)

   The standard view in anthropology today is that the Earth's physical characteristics present when life began such as atmosphere, temperature, and chemical composition were accidentally favorable to the emergence of Man. The Anthropic Principle states the opposite: the presence of human beings explains the nature of the conditions.

    Astrophysicists (scientists who study the physical characteristics of the Universe such as luminosity, density, temperature, and chemical composition) and cosmologists (scientists who study the form, content, organization, and evolution of the Universe) have discovered that the arrangement of the Universe is regular to within one part in one thousand and that, as far as can be determined, it has been that way from the beginning. Clusters of galaxies make up superclusters that are separated by vast areas of emptiness. Yet the Universe as a whole is both homogeneous and isotropic, i.e., it is the same no matter in what direction measurements are taken. Concerning the cause or causes, however, scientists are divided into two camps depending on what role they believe gravity has played in this process. One group maintains that the regularity of the Universe is inherent due to conditions of self-consistency and stability. This means that the force of gravity shaped the substructure of the Universe, i.e., the galaxies, stars and planets, but not their location with respect to each other. The other group holds that the properties of the Universe as a whole are the result of evolutionary processes caused by gravitational natural selection.

    The anthropic principle validated the latter hypothesis. Proposed by the British astrophysicist Brandon Carter in 1974 and so named by him, it showed that intelligent life selects out the actual universe from among the different possible universes. In other words, the only real universes can only be those that contain intelligent life. This means that the basic characteristics of the universe such as its size, shape, age, properties, and laws of change must be of a kind that provide for the evolution of intelligent beings.

    The anthropic theory grew out of the the analysis of dimensionless numbers. (A dimensionless number is one whose value is always the same in any system of measurement, whether earth physics or astro physics.) In the 1930s, the English physicist and Nobel laureate Paul Dirac, of antimatter fame, was the first to investigate dimensionless numbers. While studying their order of magnitude, that is, the power of 10 that expresses their value, he discovered the existence of numerical relations among several of them. Three stood out where the order of magnitude is an integral of the number 10⁴⁰. (An integral is a whole number.) These three numbers turned out to be measures of force, time, and mass.

    The first number is the gravitational coupling constant, a measure of the strength of the gravitational force with a value approximating 10^-40. The second is the age of the Universe expressed in atomic units. The ratio is approximately 10⁴⁰. The third is the number of protons and neutrons in the area of the Universe that is visible. The number is about 10⁸⁰. Dirac proposed that the numerical relations could not be simple coincidences but must be the manifestations of some relationship that had not yet been discovered.

    Dirac's ideas were not taken seriously until, in 1961, the American physicist Robert Dicke (pronounced Dickey) developed a model which showed that the existence of these apparent coincidences could be explained by the presence of Man. In other words, the presence of human beings could explain why the particular quantities discovered by Dirac are what they are. With this model, Dicke laid the mathematical foundations for the development of the anthropic theory.
Intelligent Design

    The investigations by Dicke were repeated by other scientists and produced unexpected results. They discovered that the strengths of the fundamental physical quantities that define the features of the Universe are located within a very narrow range. Had they been even slightly different then neither the Universe nor life would exist. They also found that the strengths of these irreducible forces do not change. For this reason they have been named the constants of physics.

        In the early 1980s, scientific papers on physical constants were presented at the meeting of the Royal Society of London. One was on the anthropic principle and its implication for biological evolution. The conlusion was reached that it is the specific values of the constants that make the universe and life what they are. The speed of light, the quantum of action, the force of gravity, the ratio of the proton and electron masses, the balance of the charges between the electron and the proton, and the ratio between the masses of the electron and the neutron are some of the constants. Physicists are recognizing that the 'just-so' values and the physical laws associated with them could not have arisen by chance or accident but had to have been designed.
    Evidence from biology that supports this theory began to emerge in the mid-1980s. Using the information content of structures, the American biochemist Charles Thaxton put them into three categories: a) aperiodic and unspecified, b) periodic and specified, and c) aperiodic and specified. To the first group belong systems whose parts are arranged at random. Examples are flotsam on a beach and letters of the alphabet or words written haphazardly. The information content in these is zero. Examples of the second kind in which the pattern is repeated over and over again are found on wallpaper or floor design, and in crystals, and the pattern below. Here the information content is very low.


                                                                 Escher

    Languages and the molecules of life are examples of the third group. Much like the information content of each sentence is specified by the rules of grammar, the meaning of the words used, and their sequence, so does the formation of each protein require the application of specific rules, the utilization of given elements, and the correct sequence. All these requirements could not have possibly resulted solely from the laws of physics and chemistry playing themselves out randomly any more than this sentence could have been the result of words selected at random and combined in an haphazard manner. The only possible explanation is that the protein-building process, like this sentence, was designed, and that it was programmed with a code to make this happen.



    The American biochemist Michael Behe proposed a model of intelligent design based on the principle of irreducible complexity. This means that a system cannot function if even one of the components is missing. Using the eye as an example, Behe states that its progressively changing yet functional complexity could not have been produced by slight, successive modifications of antecedent eyes because the absence of any newly evolved feature would have made the respective precursors unable to function. He explains that natural selection would have affected its evolution only if it had arisen as a unit. According to Behe, the eye can be explained only if its evolution and the evolution all other biological systems were designed.

Common sense tells us that the world is full of objects that exist and phenomena which occur even though no one is there to observe them. The act of observation, however, has been proven to be a necessary component of reality.