A very interesting philosophical paper on these issues by a danish philosopher. Discusses one of the many physical conditions I find interesting, the closeness of the "Hoyle state" to the 4He+8Be threshold. If this closeness would not exist, there would not be enough carbon and oxygen.

Since its origin in the early 1970s the anthropic principle has exerted a major influence on ideas of theoretical cosmology. Although it is today as controversial as ever, its impact is beyond discussion. This paper examines some of the early formulations of anthropic ideas, including those of Russian cosmologists G. Idlis and A. Zelmanov. These early formulations are at best vague anticipations of the anthropic principle, which as a research tool for cosmological theory was first proposed by B. Carter in 1973. The paper offers an account of how Carter came to the idea of the anthropic principle and how he originally formulated it.

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A resurgence of the stereochemical hypothesis was brought about by the selection amplification (SELEX) methodology for isolation of oligonucleotides (aptamers) that specifically bind amino acids (Yarus, et al., 2005, 2009). For eight amino acids with large side chains, aptamers significantly enriched for codon and/or anticodon triplets have been isolated. The results of aptamer experiments are somewhat inconclusive, in that, for some amino acids, the aptamers contain primarily codons, and for other amino acids, they mostly contain anticodons. Taken together, the aptamer binding data is considered to present a serious argument in support of the stereochemical hypothesis of the code origin. Nevertheless, major questions remain as to the ultimate validity and relevance of these results.

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In 2008, Xinjiang Cai of Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, discovered that M. brevicollis has the same calcium channels in its cells as those used by neurons (Molecular Biology and Evolution, DOI: 10.1093/molbev/msn077). Then, in 2010, it emerged that M. brevicollis also has several proteins that neurons use to process signals from their neighbours (BMC Evolutionary Biology, DOI: 10.1186/1471-2148-10-34).

And this year, Harold Zakon of the University of Texas at Austin and colleagues discovered that M. brevicollis has the same sodium channels that neurons use to pass electrical signals along their length (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1106363108).

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