This video will be a very welcome addition to the Privileged Planet video:
The Privileged Planet - video
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnWyPIzTOTw
As the Privileged Planet was an antidote to Sagan's 'Pale Blue Dot' fallacy,
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Carl Sagan - Pale Blue Dot
,, So to will the 'Privileged Species' be an antidote to Dawkin's 'blind, pitiless, indifference' fallacy:
"The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but blind, pitiless, indifference.”
? Richard Dawkins, River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life - p. 132
Of related note, the epistemological basis of modern science was born out of the audacious Christian presupposition that humans have a 'privileged' position in the grand scheme of things:
Epistemology – Why Should The Human Mind Even Be Able To Comprehend Reality? – Stephen Meyer - video – (Notes in description)
http://vimeo.com/32145998
So in coming full circle, it is very fitting that modern science, when pushed to its limits for resolution, would finally find that the universe appears to be designed for humans in particular:
The Place of Life and Man in Nature: Defending the Anthropocentric Thesis - Michael J. Denton - February 25, 2013
Summary (page 11)
Many of the properties of the key members of Henderson’s vital ensemble —water, oxygen, CO2, HCO3 —are in several instances fit specifically for warm-blooded, air-breathing organisms such as ourselves. These include the thermal properties of water, its low viscosity, the gaseous nature of oxygen and CO2 at ambient temperatures, the inertness of oxygen at ambient temperatures, and the bicarbonate buffer, with its anomalous pKa value and the elegant means of acid-base regulation it provides for air-breathing organisms. Some of their properties are irrelevant to other classes of organisms or even maladaptive.
It is very hard to believe there could be a similar suite of fitness for advanced carbon-based life forms. If carbon-based life is all there is, as seems likely, then the design of any active complex terrestrial being would have to closely resemble our own. Indeed the suite of properties of water, oxygen, and CO2 together impose such severe constraints on the design and functioning of the respiratory and cardiovascular systems that their design, even down to the details of capillary and alveolar structure can be inferred from first principles. For complex beings of high metabolic rate, the designs actualized in complex Terran forms are all that can be. There are no alternative physiological designs in the domain of carbon-based life that can achieve the high metabolic activity manifest in man and other higher organisms.
http://bio-complexity.org/ojs/index.php/main/article/view/BIO-C.2013.1/BIO-C.2013.1
The Fine-Tuning for Discoverability - Robin Collins - March 22, 2014
Excerpt: Examples of fine - tuning for discoverability.
,,A small increase in ? (fine structure constant) would have resulted in all open wood fires going out; yet harnessing fire was essential to the development of civilization, technology, and science - e.g., the forging of metals.,,,
Going in the other direction, if ? (fine structure constant) were decreased, light microscopes would have proportionality less resolving power without the size of living cells or other microscopic objects changing.,,,
Thus, it is quite amazing that the resolving power of light microscopes goes down to that of the smallest cell (0.2 microns), but no further. If it had less resolving power, some cells could not be observed alive. The fine - structure constant, therefore, is just small enough to allow for open wood fires and just large enough for the light microscope to be able to see all living cells.,,,
http://home.messiah.edu/~rcollins/Fine-tuning/Greer-Heard%20Forum%20paper%20draft%20for%20posting.pdf
Hugh Ross - The Anthropic Principle and The Anthropic Inequality - video
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/8494065/
Verse and Music:
Isaiah 45:18-19
For thus says the Lord, who created the heavens, who is God, who formed the earth and made it, who established it, who did not create it in vain, who formed it to be inhabited: “I am the Lord, and there is no other. I have not spoken in secret, in a dark place of the earth; I did not say to the seed of Jacob, ‘seek me in vain’; I, the Lord speak righteousness, I declare things that are right.”
Coldplay – Yellow (The Stars Shine For you)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RH3X-LLY66Y
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