Nehaveigur

In Bully for Brontosaurus, evolutionary biologist quotes this letter he received from president Jimmy Carter in response to one of his essays.

You seem to be straining mightily to prove that everything that has happened prior to an evolutionary screening period was just an accident, and that if the tape of life was replayed in countless different ways it is unlikely that cognitive creatures would have been created or evolved. It may be that when you raise “one chance in a million” to th 4th or 5th power there comes a time when pure “chance” can be questioned. I presume that you feel more at ease with the luck of 1 out of 10 to the 30th power than with the concept of a creator who/that has done some orchestrating.

Carter, who was an evangelist, was referring to the immense number of evolutionary coincidences that had to happen for human intelligence to arise, making it seem implausible that this happened without divine intervention. Gould’s answer was that it doesn’t make sense to assign probabilities after the fact. That’s true, but it also didn’t fully address Carter’s objection. There are innumerable ways in which evolutionary history could have happened without any intelligence arising.

On the other hand, the only reason we can ask these questions is that intelligence did arise, and therefore it couldn’t have been any other way. This is the anthropic principle.

I would like to propose a more satisfying answer: The universe did run the history of life millions of times. It did so through life evolving independently on millions of planets. Most of them didn’t develop intelligent life. Maybe none of them did, except ours. This post has more on this resolution to both Carter’s question and the Fermi paradox.

Here is my post on the hyperanthropic principle: The universe doesn’t just seem to be fine-tuned to develop life, but to develop intelligence and technological civilizations.

Here‘s the story of Carter’s job interview with Hyman Rickover.