When choosing their sleeping sites, primates make adaptive trade-offs between various biotic and abiotic constraints. In human-modified environments, anthropic factors may play a role. We assessed the influence of ecological (predation), social (intergroup competition), and anthropic (proximity to human settlements) factors in sleeping site choice by long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) o...

Heavy metals (Cd, Cu, Hg, Pb and Zn) concentration were determined in the marine bivalve Pinna nobilis along the Balearic Islands, comparing a protected area with two sites with strong anthropogenic influence. Analyses of Cabrera and Mallorca indicated that heavy metal concentration were generally higher in the most of samples, specially in Santa Maria bay (Cabrera, MPA), and Magaluf (Mallorca,...

Anthropic arguments in multiverse cosmology and string theory rely on the weak anthropic principle (WAP). We show that the principle is fundamentally ambiguous. It can be formulated in one of two ways, which we refer to as WAP1 and WAP2. We show that WAP2, the version most commonly used in anthropic reasoning, makes no physical predictions unless supplemented by a further assumption of “typical...

The place of an anthropic argument in the discrimination between various cosmological models is to be reconsidered following the classic criticisms of Paul C. W. Davies and Frank J. Tipler. Different versions of the anthropic argument against cosmologies involving an infinite series of past events are analyzed and applied to several instructive instances. This is not only of historical signific...

Anthropic reasoning often begins with the premise that we should expect to find ourselves typical among all intelligent observers. However, in the infinite universe predicted by inflation, there are some civilizations which have spread across their galaxies and contain huge numbers of individuals. Unless the proportion of such large civilizations is unreasonably tiny, most observers belong to t...

Any cosmological consideration must be based on one or more cosmological principles. Six of them are described namely: The Ancient Hindu, the Ancient Greek, the Genuine Copernican, the Generalized Copernican, the Perfect and the Anthropic Ones. Some cosmological principles have common properties, some are contradictory; some are logically independent, some dependent. Cosmological principles inf...

The sediment of a core collected about 2 km north of Paquetá Island, Guanabara Bay, was submitted to pollen analysis, in order to recognize the dynamics of the regional vegetation, and the anthropic influence. Radiocarbon dating of a sample next to the bottom of the core indicates an age of 4.210+/-40 14C yrs B.P (calibrated age). It was possible to establish four palynological zones. Starting ...

This paper examines Yilmaz, Ören and Aghaee's outline of present research efforts into the development of simulations that " represent the behavior of active (human) entities in the world. " The paper argues that the Carter-Bostrom formulation of the anthropic principle provides a more functional set of theoretical, and pragmatic proposals to frame the issue of the simulation of human sociocogn...