The Star Larvae Hypothesis
Nature's Plan for Humankind
Part 2. Star Larvae

Anthropic Coincidence

The physical constants of nature appear to be tuned to ensure that biological organisms (star larvae) arise and proliferate. The values of the constants suggest that biology is a product of a universal plan.

The star larvae hypothesis repositions the phylogeny of biological life into the context of a superordinate ontogeny—the stellar ontogeny. In doing so, it assigns a teleological plan—the stellar life cycle—to evolution. Repositioning phylogeny in this way reduces the gap between the scientific and religious views of nature.

Religions, and metaphysical philosophies generally, tend to interpret the structures and processes of nature as evidence of an intelligence operating behind the scenes. In traditional theological terms this view is called the Argument from Design. In the context of developing Creationist curricula for public schools, it has come to be called the doctrine of "creation science" or "intelligent design." This view of nature appeals to the powers of human observation, as does the scientific view, but it arrives at conclusions fundamentally contrary to those of science.

The argument from design calls attention to the interrelationships among the parts of nature. The interrelated, interdependent parts must accommodate each other precisely. They must be able to fulfill their functions or purposes within the whole of nature reliably, otherwise nature would grind to a halt. These requirements point to the existence of a comprehensive design. And that conclusion implies an intelligent, creative designer. The argument from design asks the skeptic to look, for example, at the eye and its ability to receive light and transfer images to the receptive centers of the brain, its ability to focus near and far, its ability to dilate and constrict its pupil to accommodate dim and bright light, its transparency to light, and so on. Clearly—so runs the argument—such a complex, perfectly tuned mechanism could not have come into being other than by the skilled hand of a supernatural creator.

Science dismisses any apparent design as being merely apparent, a projection of the human mind. The scientific view says that in reality there is no design at all—its apparentness is the result of natural, unintentional processes acting over long spans of time. The eye, for example, did not appear full-blown overnight. Its development required hundreds of millions of years to perfect, evolving from the simple light-sensitive eyespots of flatworms through countless generations of intermediate refinements to specimens, such as the eyes of raptors, which exceed in their powers of resolution even the keenest eyes of human beings. But continuous refinement is merely nature granting to individual organisms the capacity to attain reproductive age. Time takes care of the rest through phenotypical variation and natural selection, according to the scientific view.

The philosophical challenge of reconciling these perspectives has been elevated in recent years by the development within science of an idea called the Anthropic Principle. (For a thoroughgoing treatment, see John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tipler, "The Anthropic Cosmological Principle"). This idea springs from an observation about the fundamental physical constants, which include the strength of gravitational attraction, the mass of the electron, and the speed of light, among many more esoteric quantities. These constants, which are not derivable from other physical quantities, are—so far as science can determine—given in the structure of the universe; they are intrinsic properties. The interesting observation about these quantities is that they happen to lie within a narrow range of values within which they must lie to enable a universe such as ours to exist in the first place. Slight changes in any of these fundamental quantities would likely render the universe far less interesting—far less able to produce atoms and molecules, stars and planets, galaxies and that highly contingent entity, the biological organism. The universe seems to have been "tuned" expressly for our sake. Newly emboldened critics of science have grabbed this ball and tried to score with it by arguing that the odds against so many fortuitous coincidences—the alignment of constants that makes us possible—renders implausible any alternative to intelligent design.

The scientific corner offers a ready rebuttal to this view. The scientific rejoinder asserts that humankind should not be surprised to find itself in a universe in which the laws of physics allow it to exist. If humankind’s existence were precluded in the first place by fundamental physics, then no one would be around to make observations of any kind whatsoever. In other words, starting from the fact that we can ask questions about our existence, scientists are unimpressed by the "coincidence" of fundamental constants that allows us to do so. It is a necessary given, given the fact that humans exist.

Nonetheless, the questions remain. Why do the fundamental constants have precisely the values that they have? Why isn't the universe an indistinct lump or a diffuse fog, containing no particularly interesting structures? Does a kind of necessity force the laws of nature to be what they are?

With the Anthropic Principle as a backdrop, the Argument from Design can be stepped back from the realm of biology, and the Evolution-Creation debate, to which it traditionally has been applied, to more fundamental considerations. The argument from design gains a leg up on Darwinism when it forces us to look beyond the merely organic phenomena that science explains with evolution. For example, when science responds to the example of the eye with an appeal to natural selection, it begs the question as to why the molecules that compose the eye are able to have precisely the physical properties that enable them to interact chemically as they do to make possible the structure of the retina, cornea, lens, etc., with their precise physical characteristics. And the same consideration can be made for the atoms that compose the molecules.

No one argues that carbon atoms, for example, evolved from ancestral atoms and that their evolution favored those ancestral forms with properties more conducive to successful reproduction. Carbon atoms possess the nuclear and chemical properties that they do, because they just do. That is what it means to be a carbon atom.

Atoms don’t reproduce through successive generations, and so the application of natural selection to explain the properties of atoms is absurd from the outset.

Or?

Could selection pressures influence the properties of carbon, or other, atoms through the course of stellar generations (stars being the bodies that manufacture atoms)?

More bombastically, one could ask whether atoms might be pre-programmed to assemble themselves into this particular universe in any way analogous to that in which acorns are preprogrammed to assemble atoms and molecules into oak trees. The Anthropic Principle invites science to expand the concepts of ontogeny and phylogeny and gather physical processes of all kinds under the Principle’s teleological umbrella. A possible repositioning of natural processes in this context—putting everything into a Darwinian context—would undercut the Argument from Design's supernatural foundation. Science gets a leg up on Creationism when it proposes that universes themselves evolve and that the physical constants have been tuned, not by God, but by cosmological natural selection.

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