The Punctuated Participatory Anthropic Principle

1. John Wheeler came up with the "Participatory Anthropic Principle," in which the entire early universe expands as one vast collection of entangled particles until an "observer" becomes one of the quantum possibilities, at which point that "observer" observes itself into actuality.
2. What Wheeler failed to note was the "petunia problem" (citing Douglas Adams in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, where a sperm whale and a bowl of petunias appear in mid-air and then crash to the ground). An "observer" can exist long enough to "collapse the quantum wavefunction" yet not be able to exist very long after that. Wheeler's original Participatory Anthropic Principle must be modified into a Punctuated Participatory Anthropic Principle ("PPAP") in light of this problem.
3. A PPAP should leave a distinctive trail in the genome that is as recognizable as the trail a subatomic particle leaves in a bubble chamber. This is because there are two kinds of "evolution" in operation--an "observer-driven evolution" that defies all odds as it produces the most intelligent organism possible in the shortest possible time, and a random "devolution" that cascades down from these more advanced organisms.
4. On Earth, PPAP would predict some radical anomalies in the fossil record. There should be a few impossibly advanced species very early in the fossil record, with many variations radiating out from that ancestral stock. (This goes directly against the Darwinian model of long, slow growth towards the more advanced species.)
5. The secular scientists should be able to take the model and look for anomalies. The most obvious ones are (a) the sudden appearance of life on earth which leads some to suggest some form of panspermia, (b) the radical diversification of multicellular animal life in the Cambrian Explosion, and (c) the perplexingly early appearance of birds in the fossil record.
6. PPAP suggests that humans are not the only intelligent life-forms in the universe. This means that even the most secular scientists might want to take a second look at the book of Genesis. Genesis 1 might not be just a man-made myth; it could contain a communication from another intelligence (whether God, "angels," "fallen angels," or extra-terrestrial biological beings). PPAP makes it possible for secular people to consider the account of Genesis 1 as reliable information about a pre-human history.
   
7. When we add Scripture to this reasoning, we get more specific about what to look for in the fossil and/or DNA record. Genesis 1 tells us that flowering plants appeared before the sun (1:11), the lights in the heavens appeared for signs and seasons (1:14), and birds appeared before land animals (1:20).

• If flowering plants appeared before the sun, they must have appeared on some other planet. This suggests that pollen grains can travel between the stars. There is very little research on this topic (it is known as "reverse panspermia"), so I can't say whether it is possible or not--just that it is a falsifiable prediction of the PPAP hypothesis.
• If the sun, moon, and stars appeared for signs and for seasons in a PPAP universe, an "observer" probably observed them. Modern molluscs have a camera eye that is startlingly similar to the vertebrate eye. Octopi are unbelievably intelligent-- but have terribly short lifespans (one or two years). They don't leave much in the way of fossils, so we need to look at the modern DNA to hunt for an common ancestor to link the vertebrate eye with a Cambrian observer.
• Birds are the easiest observer to find in the fossil record. Avian intelligence is very high, and bird bones are preserved often enough to suggest that dinosaurs descended from birds, not vice versa. The "birds came first" theory is based solely on fossil evidence, not any Scripture--but Genesis 1:20 fits perfectly with PPAP.

The Participatory Anthropic Principle

Science studies space, time, matter, and energy. Does it have a place for truth, love, beauty, or justice? Each of these depends upon “consciousness,” an “emergent property” of the material world. If intelligence here on Earth is just a statistical fluke in an otherwise lifeless universe, then categories like “beauty” or “justice” have no intrinsic meaning. In that kind of a universe, “meaning” is what humans impose on their surroundings, not something they discover within them.

Modern methodogical materialism takes the position that intelligence here on Earth is, in fact, just a statistical fluke. Our understanding of the laws of physics makes it possible, in theory, to spell out a chain of events from some kind of initial quantum fluctuation through a warm, wet pond somewhere in Earth’s pre-history to the first anthropoid who ever grunted, “I think, therefore I am!” The materialist believes that because such a sequence can be imagined, no other explanations are required.

But is this sound reasoning? If I take the latest Hollywood thriller, I can show you a single chain of events from the opening credits through the 90 mile-per-hour car chase on the wrong lane of a crowded freeway to the multi-billion dollar jackpot at the end. Is a mere unbroken sequence of events enough to prove the materialism?

John Wheeler (the physicist who coined the term “black hole”) proposed a “participatory anthropic principle” which makes the quantum concept of an “observation” even more basic than the physical realities of space, time, matter, and energy. In Wheeler’s model, an “observation” by a material being billions of years after the Big Bang that “caused” space, time, matter, and energy to exist in the first place.