richard_dawkins_-_the_god_delusion

140 T H V. C, O L) I) I- i U S I O N
over the planet, on all continents and islands, and at all times. We
can safely predict that, if we wait another ten million years, a whole
new set of species will be as well adapted to their ways of life as
today's species are to theirs. This is a recurrent, predictable,
multiple phenomenon, not a piece of statistical luck recognized
with hindsight. And, thanks to Darwin, we know how it is brought
about: by natural selection.
The anthropic principle is impotent to explain the multifarious
details of living creatures. We really need Darwin's powerful crane
to account for the diversity of life on Earth, and especially the
persuasive illusion of design. The origin of life, by contrast, lies outside
the reach of that crane, because natural selection cannot
proceed without it. Here the anthropic principle comes into its
own. We can deal with the unique origin of life by postulating a
very large number of planetary opportunities. Once that initial
stroke of luck has been granted - and the anthropic principle most
decisively grants it to us - natural selection takes over: and natural
selection is emphatically not a matter of luck.
Nevertheless, it may be that the origin of life is not the only
major gap in the evolutionary story that is bridged by sheer luck,
anthropically justified. For example, my colleague Mark Ridley in
Mendel's Demon (gratuitously and confusingly retitled The
Cooperative Gene by his American publishers) has suggested that
the origin of the eucaryotic cell (our kind of cell, with a nucleus and
various other complicated features such as mitochondria, which are
not present in bacteria) was an even more momentous, difficult and
statistically improbable step than the origin of life. The origin of
consciousness might be another major gap whose bridging was
of the same order of improbability. One-off events like this might
be explained by the anthropic principle, along the following lines.
There are billions of planets that have developed life at the level of
bacteria, but only a fraction of these life forms ever made it across
the gap to something like the eucaryotic cell. And of these, a yet
smaller fraction managed to cross the later Rubicon to consciousness.
If both of these are one-off events, we are not dealing with a ubiquitous
and all-pervading process, as we are with ordinary, run-of-themill
biological adaptation. The anthropic principle states that,
since we are alive, eucaryotic and conscious, our planet has to be