This has been a personal bugbear of mine for a while. The anthropic principle is science's equivalent of the "God did it" card and is invoked anytime people test the limits of existing models.<p>Take for example this extract from the wiki article(<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropic_principle</a>)<p>Roger Penrose explained the weak form as follows:<p><pre><code> "The argument can be used to explain why the conditions happen to be just right for the existence of (intelligent) life on the earth at the present time.
For if they were not just right, then we should not have found ourselves to be here now, but somewhere else, at some other appropriate time.
This principle was used very effectively by Brandon Carter and Robert Dicke to resolve an issue that had puzzled physicists for a good many years.
The issue concerned various striking numerical relations that are observed to hold between the physical constants (the gravitational constant, the mass of the proton, the age of the universe, etc.).
A puzzling aspect of this was that some of the relations hold only at the present epoch in the earth's history, so we appear, coincidentally, to be living at a very special time (give or take a few million years!).
This was later explained, by Carter and Dicke, by the fact that this epoch coincided with the lifetime of what are called main-sequence stars, such as the sun.
At any other epoch, so the argument ran, there would be no intelligent life around in order to measure the physical constants in question-so the coincidence had to hold, simply because there would be intelligent life around only at the particular time that the coincidence did hold!"
The Emperor's New Mind, Chapter 10
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Rather than create a model of how this coincidence occurs, it is simply ignored as "well it had to occur or we couldn't talk about it". For example, this coincidence may occur because we somehow derive our relational understandings and measurements from universal constants in the first place.<p>You can certainly derive something from the fact that we (life) exist but when you explain away observations with a simple "well we couldnt be here to talk about it otherwise" you are implying one of the following:<p>1. There is a design to the universe<p>2. The universe as it is is inevitable<p>3. Every possible combination of variables has existed or does exist and we are simply the result of the law of large numbers.<p>Either way there is some burden of proof.