Note: My mailer added a CC to Olin, which it has not previously done,
and I have changed no settings. I note that Olin was bolloc... er
advising someone recently re direct CCs to him. I don't know if the
list server has decided Olin needs more friends, or if Gmail has, or
if Olin's interesting email client has.

>> PhysOrg.com wrote:

>>  -- One of the most controversial questions in cosmology
>> is why the fundamental constants of nature seem fine-tuned for life.>

> If they weren't we wouldn't be here to ask the question.

Otherwise known as the weak anthropic  principle.

But

While not disagreeing violently with the general point you are trying
to make, I note:

> Or put another
> way, you can't draw any conclusions from a self-selected set of samples,
> even more so when that is only one sample.

is not so safe an assumption here as it may be in some cases, and it's
at least arguable whether the sample is "self selected" and even one
sample can and here does convey information.

One sample tells us that life can and does exist.
A zero life sample would leave us wondering, except that if we are
wondering we may be life and probably exist :-).

And, if the probability of the universe supporting life of any sort is
as small as it appears to be, but we are here because of the weak
anthropic principle, then are there an infinitude of universes that we
are a probabilisitic part of, or is the "array of universes" sparse
and we are part of a few that are tailored, however such tailoring may
happen, or ... . AND is an infinitiude of unioverses more probable
than life (or other) diorected tailoring, or ...?,

All of which rather supports the assertion (Physorg's, not mine.)

"-- One of the most controversial questions in cosmology"

Along the way you get spinoff's such as Fermi's* paradox.

           http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fermi_paradox

Which just adds weight to the assertion.
And interest.

The first discovered QUASAR wasn't named LGM1 for nothing.

          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGM-1

Or, maybe, it was :-)

         Russell
--=20
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