Vampires and the Anthropic Principle - a response

I read a number of Intelligent Design blogs, just to see what they have to say. I find it interesting to read what "the other side" thinks and how their arguments are structured. Over the years, the biggest frustration of mine is that they often use straw man arguments as they fail to grasp what evolutionary biologists are trying to say. Furthermore, they seem to misunderstand science in general and how it progresses. Anyway, this post isn't about that complain specifically, but I wanted to write about a post at a new blog I've been introduced to that brings Vampires into the Anthropic Principle to strengthen the argument... he says.

Go ahead and read what he has to say...

http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2010/02/10/vampires-and-the-anthropic-principle/#more-12597

This is going to be somewhat random, so here goes...

1) Claim: If Vampires existed, then their feeding patterns would overrun the human race within a few years.

The base of this claim is that a vampire converts a human into a new vampire each time it feeds, which means that there will be an exponential increase in the number of vampires and a corresponding decrease in the humber of humans. While I don't have any issues with the mathematics of this (even though he leaves out the possibility that some humans are killed without being turned and some vampires are going to be killed as well), the main problem is that - being a legend - there are great variations in the stores around vampires. In fact, in literature such as Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the base assumption isn't valid. It's annoying when I disagree with the base assumptions, but what can you do.

At any rate, for the sake of making things sound formal, he continues with calling Vampires "V-class objects" in recognition that there could be other destructive agents in the universe.

Moving along, he states the Anthropic Principal in a negative way (so he says).

2) Claim: In order for humans to exist, there must be no V-class objects in existence.

To restate this, he's simply saying that in order for humans to exist, there must be nothing in existence that would kill off all the humans. When you state it this way, it almost sounds silly. It is, in fact, a tautology when stated like this. In my opinion, this shows that he lends no additional argument to what the anthropic principle already says, which is that the universe must be amicable to our existence simply because we exist.

He is trying to argue that the probabilities that the universe would be able to support life is calculated separately from the probability that the universe does not contain things that would kill off all life. Since these are logical inverses of each other, separating their meaning into two probability calculations seems unjustified.

Besides, the anthropic principle's purpose in life is to show that the probabilities are next to meaningless. To state it in my own way, it says that the fact we exist means that the necessary elements must have been in place. Anecdotally, to the person who won, the chances of winning the lottery are irrelevant... because they already won. Once an even occurs, we now have a given and no longer a chance calculation. It might be interesting to tell a millionaire that there was only a 0.0001% chance of him winning, but that won't change the fact that he won after only playing 14 times.

3) Claim: the likelihood of existence of a V-class object exists as an independent probability.

This claim is not directly in the post, but rather a base assumption that I see in the text. In order for any probability calculation like this to make sense we basically have to have independent events. As soon as there is causation between elements of the calculation, using a raw probability does not make sense.

As an aside, this seems to be the major issue with the tornado in the junkyard producing the 747 argument. Yes, the probability of that happening is low... so low as to assume it can't happen by chance. But biologists do not claim that random chance is responsible for the development of life on this planet. So, to use an analogy of a tornado is not a valid comparison. Period.

In the case of V-class objects, there is the implicit assumption that the development of such objects is independent of the development of humans. This isn't the case, however. Humans have, along with all other life on this planet, become successful while competing for the resources of the environment in which we life. This competition implies a couple of things.

First, there have been things that otherwise might have been V-class objects that died off due to some other reason. Maybe there was a superbug that would kill off humans, but it was isolated in a small town. Maybe there was a species of saber tooth cat that might have wiped out humans, but it failed in other ways. (Remember, just because something can kill us doesn't mean that it isn't vulnerable to other organisms. Maybe our V-class objects have been killed off by W-class objects.)

Secondly, and a bit of a continuation of the last point, maybe we are the V-class object. In the course of our evolution we have killed off numerous other species. Some incidentally, some directly... but the recurring theme is that we are still here and those aren't. Of course, it would be arrogant to assume that we are somehow more successful than other animals. The sharks and alligators seem to have done far better than us when it comes to staying power. Maybe we can play piano, but if success is measured by years in existence, we're just getting started. Maybe we just haven't met any V-class objects yet.