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The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science
Philosophy of science

The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science. The field is defined by an interest in one of a set of "traditional" problems or an interest in central or foundational concerns in science....
 that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth. It is a Copernican principle
Copernican principle

In cosmology, the Copernican principle, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, states the Earth is not in a central, specially favoured position. More recently, the principle is generalised to the Theory of relativity concept that humans are not privileged observers of the universe....
, used either as a heuristic
Heuristic

Heuristic is an adjective for methods that help in problem solving, in turn leading to learning and discovery. These methods in most cases employ experimentation and trial-and-error techniques....
 about Earth's position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity
Mediocrity principle

The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth. It is a Copernican principle, used either as a heuristic about Earth's position or a Mediocrity principle#As a philosophical statement....
. In a broader context, the mediocrity principle states that whenever one observes a phenomenon, it is likely that the observed occurrence is only one out of many occurrences; if one witnesses an extraordinary event, it should be assumed that the event occurs more than once, given the proper circumstances.

The mediocrity principle as applied to humanity's and Earth's existence is further boosted by:

Earth is an unexceptional planet
The traditional formulation of the Copernican mediocrity principle is usually played out in the following way: Ancients of the Middle East and west once thought that the Earth was at the center of the universe, but Copernicus proposed that the Sun was at the center.






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The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science
Philosophy of science

The philosophy of science is concerned with the assumptions, foundations, and implications of science. The field is defined by an interest in one of a set of "traditional" problems or an interest in central or foundational concerns in science....
 that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth. It is a Copernican principle
Copernican principle

In cosmology, the Copernican principle, named after Nicolaus Copernicus, states the Earth is not in a central, specially favoured position. More recently, the principle is generalised to the Theory of relativity concept that humans are not privileged observers of the universe....
, used either as a heuristic
Heuristic

Heuristic is an adjective for methods that help in problem solving, in turn leading to learning and discovery. These methods in most cases employ experimentation and trial-and-error techniques....
 about Earth's position or a philosophical statement about the place of humanity
Mediocrity principle

The mediocrity principle is the notion in the philosophy of science that there is nothing special about humans or the Earth. It is a Copernican principle, used either as a heuristic about Earth's position or a Mediocrity principle#As a philosophical statement....
. In a broader context, the mediocrity principle states that whenever one observes a phenomenon, it is likely that the observed occurrence is only one out of many occurrences; if one witnesses an extraordinary event, it should be assumed that the event occurs more than once, given the proper circumstances.

The mediocrity principle as applied to humanity's and Earth's existence is further boosted by:
  • Fossil evidence supported by genetics concluding that all humans have a common ancestor about 100,000 years ago and that they share a common ancestor with chimpanzees and bonobo
    Bonobo

    The Bonobo , which, until recently, usually was called the Pygmy Chimpanzee and less often, the Dwarf or Gracile Chimpanzee, is a great ape and one of the two species making up the genus, chimpanzee....
    s about six million years ago. Therefore humans are part of the biosphere, not above it or unique to it.
  • Humans share about 98% of their DNA
    DNA

    Deoxyribonucleic acid is a nucleic acid that contains the genetics instructions used in the development and functioning of all known living organisms and some viruses....
     with chimpanzees. Chimpanzees have actually undergone more genetic change than humans.
  • The answering of Schrödinger's question What is Life?
    What is Life? (Schrödinger)

    What Is Life? with Mind and Matter is a non-fiction book on science for the lay reader written by physicist Erwin Schr?dinger. One of the discoverers of the structure of DNA, Francis Crick, credited What Is Life? as a theoretical description, before the actual discovery of the structure of DNA , of how Genetics storage would...
     through the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA and the reduction of life to organic chemistry, negating the vitalism
    Vitalism

    Vitalism, as defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary, is#a doctrine that the functions of a living organism are due to a vital principle distinct from biochemical reactions...
     of previous centuries.
  • Edwin Hubble
    Edwin Hubble

    Edwin Powell Hubble was an United States Astronomy. He profoundly changed astronomers' understanding of the nature of the universe by demonstrating the existence of other galaxies besides the Milky Way....
     discovered that the universe is substantially larger than humans first thought and James Hutton
    James Hutton

    James Hutton Doctor of Medicine was a Scotland geologist, physician, Natural history, chemist and experimental Agriculture. He is considered the father of modern geology....
     discovered the Earth is a lot older. The Hubble Deep Field
    Hubble Deep Field

    The Hubble Deep Field is an image of a small region in the constellation Ursa Major, constructed from a series of observations by the Hubble Space Telescope....
     is a long exposure of thousands of galaxies, making it one of the best pictorial representations of the principle of mediocrity.


Earth is an unexceptional planet


The traditional formulation of the Copernican mediocrity principle is usually played out in the following way: Ancients of the Middle East and west once thought that the Earth was at the center of the universe, but Copernicus proposed that the Sun was at the center. In the 1930s, RJ Trumpler
Robert Julius Trumpler

Robert Julius Trumpler was a Switzerland-United States astronomer. He was born in Z?rich, Switzerland and obtained his early education in that country....
 found that the solar system was not at the center of the Milky Way Galaxy (as Jacobus Kapteyn
Jacobus Kapteyn

Jacobus Cornelius Kapteyn, was a Netherlands astronomy, best known for his extensive studies of the Milky Way and as the first discoverer of evidence for Galaxy rotation curve....
 claimed), but 56% of the way out to the rim of the galaxy's core
Galactic Center

The Galactic Center is the rotational center of the Milky Way galaxy. It is located about away from the Earth in the direction of the constellations Sagittarius , Ophiuchus_, and Scorpius where the Milky Way appears brightest....
. In the mid-twentieth century, George Gamow
George Gamow

George Gamow , born Georgiy Antonovich Gamov , was a Russian Empire-born theoretical physicist and cosmologist. He discovered quantum tunneling and worked on radioactive decay of the atomic nucleus, stellar evolution, stellar nucleosynthesis, big bang nucleosynthesis, nucleocosmogenesis and genetics....
 (et al.) showed that although it appears that our Galaxy is at the center of an expanding universe (in accordance with Hubble's law
Hubble's law

Hubble's law is the statement in physical cosmology that distant galaxy are receding from us at a velocity Proportionality to their distance from us....
), every point in space experiences the same phenomenon. And, at the end of the twentieth century, Geoff Marcy
Geoffrey Marcy

Geoffrey W. Marcy is famous for discovering more extrasolar planets than anyone else, 70 out of the first 100 to be discovered, along with R. Paul Butler and Debra Fischer....
 and colleagues discovered that extrasolar planets are quite common, putting to rest the idea that the Sun is unusual in having planets. In short, Copernican mediocrity is a series of astronomical
Astronomy

Astronomy is the science of Astronomical object and Phenomenon that originate outside the Earth's atmosphere . It is concerned with the evolution, physics, chemistry, meteorology, and motion of celestial objects, as well as the physical cosmology....
 findings that the Earth
Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun. Earth is the largest of the terrestrial planets in the Solar System in diameter, mass and density. It is also referred to as the World and Wiktionary:Terra.Note that by International Astronomical Union convention, the term "Terra" is used for naming extensive land masses, rather...
 is a relatively ordinary planet orbiting a relatively ordinary star
Drake equation

The Drake equation is a famous result in the speculative fields of exobiology and the SETI .This equation was devised by Frank Drake in 1960, in an attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial life civilizations in our galaxy with which we might come in contact....
 in a relatively ordinary galaxy
Galaxy

A galaxy is a massive, gravitation system that consists of stars and stellar remnants, an interstellar medium of gas and cosmic dust, and an important but poorly-understood component tentatively dubbed dark matter....
 which is one of countless others in a giant universe, possibly within an infinite multiverse
Multiverse (science)

The multiverse is the hypothetical set of multiple possible universes that together comprise all of reality. The different universes within the multiverse are sometimes called parallel universes....
. Nevertheless both George Gamow and Geoffrey Marcy have been accused of adopting unscientific methods in most of their core studies, letting those remain hypothetic up to date.

On the ordinariness of humanity

  • Evolutionary psychology
    Evolutionary psychology

    Evolutionary psychology attempts to explain Mind and psychology Trait theorys?such as memory, perception, or language?as adaptations, that is, as the functional products of natural selection or sexual selection....
     is discovering the limits to human rationality, biological psychology
    Biological psychology

    In psychology, biological psychology, also known as biopsychology, psychobiology, or behavioral neuroscience is the application of the principles of biology to the study of mental processes and behavior....
     exposes the material nature of cognition and moral sense with fMRI scans, economic and political studies find regularities in the behaviors of large groups of humans.
  • Francis Crick
    Francis Crick

    Francis Harry Compton Crick Order of Merit Royal Society , Ph.D., was a British molecular biology, physics, and neuroscience, and most noted for being one of the co-discoverers of the structure of the DNA molecule in 1953....
    's "Astonishing Hypothesis
    The Astonishing Hypothesis

    The Astonishing Hypothesisis Francis Crick's 1994 book about consciousness. The book is mostly concerned with establishing a basis for scientific study of consciousness; however, Crick places the study of consciousness within a larger social context....
    " is that consciousness
    Consciousness

    Consciousness is a difficult term to define, because the word is used and understood in a wide variety of ways, so that it frequently happens that what one person sees as a definition of consciousness is seen by others as about something else altogether....
     is simply the function of the brain.
  • When the Human Genome Project
    Human Genome Project

    The Human Genome Project was an international scientific research project with a primary goal to determine the sequence of chemical base pairs which make up DNA and to identify and map the approximately 20,000-25,000 genes of the human genome from both a physical and functional standpoint...
     released its findings in 2003, it was discovered that the human genome only has 24,000 genes. As recently as the 1990s, humans were considered so complex as to have about 300,000 genes
    Gênes

    G?nes is the name of a d?partement in France of the First French Empire in present Italy. It was named after the city Genoa. It was formed in 1805, when Napoleon Bonaparte occupied the Republic of Genoa....
    .


As a philosophical statement


There is a stronger, philosophical version of the mediocrity principle. This associates the Renaissance
Renaissance

The Renaissance was a cultural movement that spanned roughly the 14th to the 17th century, beginning in Italy in the late Middle Ages and later spreading to the rest of Europe....
 with greater openness to radical ideas. The belief is that the Roman Catholic dogma
Dogma

Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, ideology or any kind of organization: it is authority and not to be disputed, doubted or heresy....
 of the day, with regards to the place of Earth in the cosmos, was that if God made man in God's image and that this were God's most perfect creation, then there was only one logical place to put this most perfect creation—at the center of the Universe. Therefore, Copernicus's suggestion that Earth was not the center of the entire Universe, implied
Modus tollens

In classical logic, modus tollens has the following argument form:Modus tollens is sometimes confused with indirect proof or proof by contrapositive ....
 the theological
Theology

Theology is the study of the existence or attributes of a deity or gods, or more generally the study of religion or spirituality. It is sometimes contrasted with religious studies: theology is understood as the study of religion from an internal perspective , and religious studies as the study of religion from an external perspective....
 conclusion that man was not God's most perfect creation.

See also

  • Anthropic principle
    Anthropic principle

    In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle is the collective name for several ways of asserting that physical and chemistry theories, especially astrophysics and cosmology, need to take into account that there is life on Earth, and that one form of that life, Homo sapiens, has attained sapience....
     - the only universe that we can observe is one that allows for our existence.
  • Cosmic pluralism
    Cosmic pluralism

    Cosmic pluralism, the plurality of worlds, or simply pluralism, describes the belief in numerous other worlds which harbour extraterrestrial life#beliefs in extraterrestrial life....
  • Deep ecology
    Deep ecology

    Deep ecology is a recent branch of ecological philosophy that considers humankind an integral part of its natural environment. It is a body of thought that places greater value on non-human species, ecosystems and processes in nature than established environmental movement and green movements....
  • Defeatism
    Defeatism

    Defeatism is acceptance of defeat without struggle. In everyday use, defeatism has negative connotation and is often linked to treason and pessimism, or even a hopeless situation such as a Catch-22 ....
  • Drake equation
    Drake equation

    The Drake equation is a famous result in the speculative fields of exobiology and the SETI .This equation was devised by Frank Drake in 1960, in an attempt to estimate the number of extraterrestrial life civilizations in our galaxy with which we might come in contact....
  • Fatalism
    Fatalism

    Fatalism is a philosophical doctrine emphasizing the subjugation of all events or actions to destiny or inevitable predetermination.Fatalism generally refers to several of the following ideas:...
  • Geocentric cosmology of Aristotle
    Aristotle

    Aristotle was a Greeks philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. He wrote on many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, Poetics , theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology and zoology....
     and Ptolemy
    Ptolemy

    Claudius Ptolemaeus , known in English as Ptolemy , was a Roman Greek mathematics, Greek astronomy, geographer and astrologer. He lived in History of Roman Egypt, and was probably born there in a town in the Thebaid called Ptolemais Hermiou; he died in Alexandria around 168 AD....
  • Nihilism
    Nihilism

    Nihilism is the philosophy position that value_theory do not exist but rather are falsely invented. Most commonly, nihilism is presented in the form of Nihilism#Existential_nihilism which argues that life is without meaning, purpose or intrinsic value ....
  • Plenitude principle
    Plenitude principle

    The plenitude principle or principle of plenitude asserts that everything that can happen will happen.The Intellectual history Arthur Oncken Lovejoy was the first to discuss this philosophy important Principle explicitly, it back to Aristotle, who said that no possibilities which remain eternally possible will go unrealized, then for...
  • Ptolemaic system
    Ptolemaic System

    In the Ptolemaic system, each planet is moved by five or more spheres: one sphere is its deferent. The deferent was a circle centered around a point halfway between the equant and the earth....
  • The Rare Earth hypothesis
    Rare Earth hypothesis

    In planetary astronomy and astrobiology, the Rare Earth hypothesis argues that the origin of life of complex multicellular life on Earth required an improbable combination of astrophysics and geology events and circumstances....
     is the antithesis
    Antithesis

    Antithesis is a counter-proposition and denotes a direct contrast to the original proposition. In setting the opposite, an individual brings out of a contrast in the meaning by an obvious contrast in the Idiom....
     of the Mediocrity principle
  • Total Perspective Vortex
  • Uniformity principle


Notations

  • Gonzalez, Richards, The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos is Designed for Discovery 2004
    2004 in literature

    The year 2004 in literature involved some significant events and new books....
    , Regnery Publishing, ISBN 0-89526-065-4
  • Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee. Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe. Copernicus Books. January 2000
    2000 in literature

    The year 2000 in literature involved some significant events and new books....
    . ISBN 0-387-98701-0


Footnotes


External links

  • The authors call this the 'Principle of Terrestrial Mediocrity' even though the assumption they make is that the Milky Way Galaxy is typical (rather than Earth). This term was coined by Alexander Vilenkin
    Alexander Vilenkin

    Alexander Vilenkin is Professor of Physics and Director of the Institute of Cosmology at Tufts University. A theoretical physicist who has been working in the field of Physical cosmology for 25 years, Vilenkin has written over 150 papers and is responsible for introducing the ideas of eternal inflation and quantum creation of the univers...
     (1995).