Anthropic Bias Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy Nick Bostrom
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What drives this conclusion is the near coincidence between te and  where we would a priori have no reason to suppose that these two quantities would be within an order of magnitude (or even within a factor of about two) from each other. This fact is combined with an observation selection effect to yield the prediction that the evolution of intelligent life is very unlikely to happen on a given planet within the main sequence of its star. The contribution that the observation selection effect makes is that it prevents observations of intelligent life taking longer than to evolve. Whenever intelligent life evolves on a planet we must find that it evolved before its sun went extinct. Were it not for the fact that the only evolutionary processes that are observed first-hand are those which gave rise to intelligent observers in a shorter time than , then the observation that  would have disconfirmed the hypothesis that  just as much as it disconfirmed . But thanks to this selection effect, is precisely what one would expect to observe even if the evolutionary process leading to intelligent life were intrinsically very unlikely to take place in as short a time as .
Patrick Wilson ((Wilson 1994)) advances some objections against Carter’s reasoning, but as these objections do not concern the basic anthropic methodology that Carter uses they don’t need to be addressed here. Directory: preprints preprints -> Digitally-assisted discovery and proof preprints -> Reorienting the Logic of Abduction preprints -> Supplementary Material Table 1 Download 9.31 Mb. Share with your friends:
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