of. He puts forth his fecund universes theory, which assumes universes have "offspring" through the creation of black holes whose offspring universes have values of physical constants that depend on those of the mother universe. The philosophers of cosmology John Earman, Ernan McMullin, and Jesús Mosterín contend that "in its weak version, the anthropic principle is a mere tautology, which does not allow us to explain anything or to predict anything that we did not already know. In its strong version, it is a gratuitous speculation". A further criticism by Mosterín concerns the flawed "anthropic" inference from the assumption of an infinity of worlds to the existence of one like ours: See also (an immediate precursor of the idea) (discussing the anthropic principle) (work of Alejandro Jenkins) Notes Footnotes References 5 chapters available online. Stenger, Victor J. (1999), "Anthropic design," The Skeptical Inquirer 23 (August 31, 1999): 40–43 Mosterín, Jesús (2005). "Anthropic Explanations in Cosmology." In P. Háyek, L. Valdés and D. Westerstahl (ed.), Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science, Proceedings of the 12th International Congress of the LMPS. London: King's College Publications, pp. 441–473. . A simple anthropic argument for why there are 3 spatial and 1 temporal dimensions. Shows that some of the common criticisms of AP based on its relationship with numerology or the theological Design Argument are wrong. External links Nick Bostrom: web site devoted to the Anthropic Principle. Friederich, Simon. Fine-tuning, review article of the discussion about fine-tuning, highlighting the role of the anthropic principles. Gijsbers, Victor. (2000). Theistic Anthropic Principle Refuted Positive Atheism Magazine. Chown, Marcus, Anything Goes, New Scientist, 6 June 1998. On Max Tegmark's work. Stephen Hawking, Steven Weinberg, Alexander Vilenkin, David Gross and Lawrence Krauss: Debate on Anthropic Reasoning Kavli-CERCA Conference Video Archive. Sober, Elliott R. 2009, "Absence of Evidence and Evidence of Absence – Evidential Transitivity in Connection with Fossils, Fishing, Fine-Tuning, and Firing Squads." Philosophical Studies, 2009, 143: 63–90. "Anthropic Coincidence"—the anthropic controversy as a segue to Lee Smolin's theory of cosmological natural selection. Leonard Susskind and Lee Smolin debate the Anthropic Principle. debate among scientists on arxiv.org. Evolutionary Probability and Fine Tuning Benevolent Design and the Anthropic Principle at MathPages Critical review of "The Privileged Planet" The Anthropic Principle – a review. Berger, Daniel, 2002, "An impertinent résumé of the Anthropic Cosmological Principle." A critique of Barrow & Tipler. Jürgen Schmidhuber: Papers on algorithmic theories of everything and