Thank you don_t_ask!!!
I started thinking about this stuff after reading the two books by Malcolm Gladwell, the Tipping point, and Excellence.
Really going now. Got carried away by the replies and now I’m late 
I have no problem with metaphysics in its place, I can argue metaphysics topics all day. I just don’t agree with an metaphysical anti-realist stance nor the anthropic principle, and those underlies everything you’ve said.
If we don’t really agree on such a fundamental ontological underpinnings, there’s no real point in my commenting (other than to correct such obvious mistakes of fact like the koan thing)
At the risk of veering off topic, both you and the OP have used the term “anthropic principle” in a way I am apparently unfamiliar with.
Here is how I have always understood the Anthropic Principle:
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if we have a sample size of 1, we can tentatively assume that our sample is a fairly typical example, unless we have reason to assume that our sample is, for some reason, atypical. This is the Mediocrity Principle.
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by that principle, if we pull a ball out of a bag that we know has 10 balls in it, and that ball is green, then until we have reason to believe otherwise, we should assume that most balls in the bag are green.
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by this same logic, we pulled one planet (Earth) or solar system (ours) out of all planets or solar systems in the galaxy. Our planet and solar system gave rise to life. By the mediocrity principle, we should presume that this means life is common in the universe.
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the anthropic principle counters this view. It posits that we didn’t randomly choose a world out of the set of all worlds in the galaxy; we evolved on a world that allowed our evolution. Any world that DID NOT allow intelligent life to evolve would obviously not have any humans on it to wonder if life exists on other planets. The existence of life of Earth is not an independent variable of us wondering about life, it is a precondition - so the mediocrity principal does not apply.
Yet that doesn’t seem to be how the OP is using the Anthropic Principle nor you (unless I’m missing something, I’m not sure what there is to disagree with here?).
Seconded. They seem to be using ‘anthropic’ but meaning anthropocentrism.
I feel this is better expressed by saying the definition of life is that it is the quality possessed by things that live.
It’s a circular definition but it avoids the problem of saying life has a purpose or a meaning or a reason. We should focus on figuring out what life is and not try to answer why life is. If we try to figure out why life is, we’re unconsciously positing that something made a decision and chose for life to exist. The reason why life exists may just be because it happened.
No, that’s certainly what I’m talking about when I say I don’t agree with it. At least, the Strong versions of it, the Weak version just being a tautology.
While I also disagree with anthropocentrism, that wasn’t what I was talking about.
Going off on a bit of a tangent but let’s talk about matter. If you ask most people about how matter works, they will discuss atoms, with nuclei surrounded by an accompanying swarm of electrons.
But that’s not really the way the universe works. Most of the matter that makes up the universe is a bunch of solitary nuclei with no electrons. There are also electrons around but they’re not connected to any specific nucleus of protons and neutrons.
It’s only in very rare cases, on a universal scale, that nuclei and electrons form a connection and turn into distinct atoms. So why do we treat atoms as if they are the typical case? Because that’s what we are made up of and that’s what we encounter most often. Most of the matter we encounter are solids and liquids and gases. We don’t encounter matter in plasma form as often so we don’t think of it as the typical state of matter, even though it actually is.
You lost me on your second line, and again in your list.
I do not grant that you have accurately summarized modern evolutionary theory. If that wasn’t your intent–if you mean only to draw on “classic” evolution theory as a metaphor–then the thread title, emphasizing only “evolution theory” with no qualifiers seems misleading.
I was under the impression, for instance, that modern evolutionary theory acknowledges that a great many evolutionary developments may have their origin in developments that initially do nothing to enhance reproductive prospects. It is simply that they have negligible impact on reproductive outcomes, whether or not that actually makes the organism more or less “fit to survive” in the long term. Indeed, outside of social species like humans and such, it seems plausible that there could actually be an evolutionary advantage to shorter life spans in certain scenarios, particularly where the alternative would be for individuals of a species to survive well-past their prime breeding years. In social species, particularly humans, such individuals can still be a net boon to overall survival (see “the grandmother hypothesis”). But in species that lack a cooperative nature, the ones where its members rapidly whither and die when they cease to be reproductive may well do better than otherwise identical species in which post-reproductive members remain otherwise fit and healthy, thus competing for resources (without providing any kind of positive assistance to the breeding population, in contrast to older people, who I 100% support living long and fulfilling lives with their worth not defined by their ability to reproduce).
Dear gods, no! Setting aside the history of the pseudoscience of psychology in diagnosing homosexuality as a pathological personality disorder and people on the functional end of the autistic spectrum as “retarded”, I don’t think we should be handing the keys to the kingdom over to psychologists and sociologists to “engineer” as they see fit to conform to “stated goals” because I have no desire to live in a Aldous Huxley novel or be forced to conform to someone’s arbitrary notion of what a utopia should look like, much less someone who reads the DSM-V and starts diagnosing everyone who disagree with them as having mental illness.
If I grasp your fundamental point accurately, you seem to be suggesting that the subjectivity and bias of human perception interferes with objective interpretation and analysis of information (“Human observers distort reality in predictable ways,”) and thus we should use some kind of external system to manage society based upon evidential data and objective analysis to optimize outcomes, e.g. “engineer a society to reach its stated goals.” That is a fine idea in the abstract but begs the question of who is setting the goals and controlling the system. We’ve seen various attempts throughout the last century to impose order and purpose on societies via a centralized autocracy or oligarchy, and without exception all efforts produced worse results than egalitarian societies managed by ad hoc processes as defined by more-or-less democratic principles. In fact, many of these efforts to politically manage societies along purported scientific principles have produced the worst massacres and genocides in history.
Thank you, but no; I’ll take a liberal social democracy with a well-educated populace managed by the balance of competing ideas and political philosophies negotiating to pragmatic solutions rather than some arbitarily enforced societal good. Human societies are all flawed in a multitude of ways because humans are rationalizing creatures with biased perceptions, and democracy in particular is a potpourri of flaws and misperceptions in the aggregate, but the effort to remove humanity from managing societies amplifies those flaws rather than mitigating them.
Stranger
Pressure waves exist even when no humans exist to hear them.
Is that correct or not?
Uh, no.
During the civil war it was not known that the angel glow was actually bio-luminescent bacteria that turned to have antibiotic properties.
Point being that antibiotics where there even if scientists did not discover them earlier.
By that same token, the very presence of matter is an abnormality. Most of the universe is devoid of matter. The average density of the universe is a fraction of an atom per cubic meter.
Ah, I forgot about the Strong Anthropic Principle. That’s total nonsense and complete woo, and that explains why what you guys were talking about made no sense to me when I was interpreting it as referring to the weak anthropic principle.
I won’t dignify the strong anthropic principle by changing what I refer to the “weak” anthropic principle as. And it may be a tautology, but clearly not an obvious one. How often do you hear arguments like, “There are so many planets out there that highly intelligent life MUST have evolved out there by now”, or “there are so many planets that if life could evolve by chance alone it would have done so many times by now, and the universe would be crawling with interstellar species. The fact that this isn’t the case is proof that life didn’t evolve by chance alone, therefore God”? The anthropic principle (or, if you insist, WAP) reminds us that this is flawed thinking.
To elaborate - if your point is that the (weak) anthropic principle tells us nothing new about the universe, that’s true. It isn’t a new observation, merely an examination of existing observations and how they fit together. But what it DOES do is point out certain conclusions we might want to draw based on our observations, and say “I know you think this is impossibly unlikely, but actually, you don’t know enough to form an informed opinion yet”
The OP mentions that their ideas could be applied to physics, but I do not see how at all.
First, I have a hard time understanding what Maastricht is arguing. In the OP they seem to argue that stuff only exists if it forms some kind of self-replicating meme. In physics this is kinda true. In the sense that the forms of matter that are most stable exist in greatest quantities. (e.g. one of the most abundant elements is Iron, because it is so darn stable, and the most abundant molecule is water, again because it tends to be very stable). However, I think that for the idea of a meme to be applicable, the thing in question needs to be self-replicating in some way. This does NOT apply to the vast majority of matter. States of matter, most of the time, cannot self-replicate.
However, in later posts Maastricht seems to imply that stuff exists because we observe it (I think?). This is obviously not the case, and is a common misinterpretation of quantum mechanics.
To be straight forward, Maastricht, you say you are studying in biology. If you want to make it in STEM you need to express yourself precisely and clearly. All your good ideas must be so precise that they would fit in a math class (even if the subject is biology). If you don’t do this then, even if the ideas sound nice and philosophical, they will never be useful and you will not be taken seriously.
The way to produce useful ideas is to always ask “why”, and try to answer those questions as precisely as possible. Your ideas above simply do not answer any “why” questions that we don’t already have answers for (or at least working theories).
To be even more brutally honest, you’re going to have to give up trying to understand “the big picture”. This is always very hard to do. It was very hard for me, and quite often I have to real my mind back in from thoughts that are too big and grandiose. The reason for this is twofold. 1) You have to walk before you can run. At this point you are still a student and have a lot to learn about being precise. You need to focus on walking for the time being. 2) Big ideas take exponentially longer to express, nevertheless develop and test properly. Notice there is a fundamental limit on how “big” the one-person ideas in science are. Even if you are as smart as Einstein, you will simply will never have the time to develop a theory bigger than the relatively.
To Maastrict, I want to be clear, I think your curiosity in trying to understand and explain is great, I don’t want to discourage that at all. I just want to encourage you to be precise, and that being sufficiently precise to make progress that is useful for other people takes MUCH more time then you’d expect. Because of this, a scientist will, in general, only ever be able to answer one small question at a time and hope all the small questions answered together will sum to something bigger if kept at it for a lifetime. This is the unfortunate reality of our tiny brains.
Except we do know enough, at least about the possibility of life elsewhere. Because we do know more than just that life developed on Earth. We also have experience of places that it didn’t develop. And we know the abundance of life precursors in the Universe. So it’s not just a datum of 1.
I think what people often forget when they think about evolution us that it’s not enough for an organism to survive and reproduce - their offspring also need to survive and reproduce.
I read a book several years ago, The History of the Human Body by Daniel Lieberman. One of his thesis’s was that if there are two co-existing tribes, the tribe that reproduces the most, even if the variance is slight, will eventually become the dominant group and their physical characteristics will prevail, regardless of how those characteristics benefit the individual. I believe it’s called the founder effect or something, it’s been a long time since I read that book. But it was an argument in favor of evolution “favoring” cooperation over competition.
Anyway, count me in among the people that’s having trouble understanding your thesis, but it sounds like you might be talking about non-DNA inheritance systems and their interaction with DNA-based inheritance.
For example, language is a non DNA inheritance system, we use language to transmit information to our offspring. But there are DNA based factors that can effect the narratives and stories we pass on. While I think most evolutionary psychology is bullshit, the stuff like “women like pink because the evolved to hunt berries”, I do believe that our actions are affected by the evolved “chemical balance” of our brains……chemicals like cortisol and adrenaline can effect how we react to stress, chemicals like oxytocin and vasopressin affect many of our social behaviors like pair bonding and tribalism, and all of this affects the world we build for ourselves.
But I don’t even know if I’m talking past you, because I’m still not totally clear on your thesis. But I’d like to recommend one of my favorite books - Evolution in Four Dimensions - Genetic, Epigenetic, Behavorial and Symbolic Variation in the History of Life by Eva Jamblonka and Marion J. Lamb.
A lot of the science presented is highly technical, but it’s written so a general reader can “hum over” the more technical portions and still absorb the points the writers are making, and each chapter ends with a fairly hard-hitting Q & A, in which the authors defend their conclusions.