Application of the Anthropic Principle

Island, over at Science in Crisis, asked me to comment on his post Global Warming too?... what next, politics? after reading my thoughts regarding Critics of Global Warming. I am going to duplicate my thoughts here for archival purposes:

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Island was kind enough to invite me to comment on this discussion. I am pleased to do so, since we can all learn if we all talk.

It would seem at first reading that Island believes in the strong anthropic principle, whereas I believe in the weak anthropic principle. The two are very different, indeed. The strong version insists that everything will always work out because we are meant to be here. I think that is a great way of burying one's head in the sand.

I am an evolutionist, for the simple reason that the evolutionary algorithm is testable and, further, I have tested it with computer models. It is a simple and elegant theory which explains much. The evolutionary algorithm has ramifications for this discussion because it can explain our likely future if we continue to "piss in our rice bowl". I once created a small agent model to show what happens to a human society when they overreach their environment's capacity to support them. Try it. Read the text under the applet and then try running the model with the default settings. Then try varying the settings. Download the source code and look at the algorithms I used. In many, many cases, humans simply starve to death. All of them. The environment eventually recovers. Unless you can find a reason to dispute the underlying presumptions of the model, the result should cause you to agree with David Suzuki: The Earth is not in trouble. We are.

The weak anthropic principle, on the other hand, states that, of all the possible ways the universe could have evolved, at least one of them had to allow us to evolve. No hand of God is implicated, in spite of Island's suggestion to the contrary. The weak anthropic principle makes no claim about our future at all. It does not guarantee our safety. It does not suggest that the universe is not a dangerous place. It leaves room for us to become just another evolutionary dead end. It is up to us to stop that from happening. We have a better chance of manipulating the situation for our own survival than any species before us, but we have to work for it.

The economic principle the Tragedy of the Commons illustrates our situation best. Humans have become the undisputed top predator in our environment. No other species threatens us now. As we compete with each other, we fall into the Tragedy of the Commons, where the common good is subsumed by short-term greed. That was not critical to the entire species before, although we certainly saw the effect when the Greeks destroyed their farming centers through poor irrigation, Rome devastated Libya's fields and China began its cycle of spasmotic famines. Now the Commons stretches across the globe. We only have two choices: Allow the Tragedy of the Commons to play out once again, collapsing our civilization the way it has collapsed others or agree that the common good really should take precedence this time.