I just can’t see how the evidence for the anthropic principle exists anywhere except for pure conjecture. If Krauss can’t get his view of string theory to work, maybe it’s because it doesn’t. I don’t see how it follows that if a theory doesn’t work then the alternative must be the anthropic principle-—now that’s a leap of faith. It could also be that string theory and other, related theories are not my bailiwick. But, as a life scientist of 47 years’ practice, I see strong (a gross understatement) evidence that life forms adapt to the universe, or die, and that the universe did not or does not adapt to us.
But anthropic principle researchers are generally not examining the adaptation of life forms to the universe, or the universe to life forms, but rather asking what kind of universe would have been necessary for there to be life at all-— the same sort of question Stephen Wolfram and Stuart Kauffman have asked. And the design inference is not, "these theories don't work, therefore, magic explanation x must be true" but rather an inference to the best explantion based upon markers of design., connecting the dots much as a data mining program searching for terrorist activity does.
What Gonzalez does on his own (not the university’s) time is a subset of that work that provides empirical evidence from astronomy, chemistry and biology that the principle of mediocrity that Carl Sagan popularized was false.
Your comments about purpose making man superior to an indifferent universe are interesting. While you find purpose as something that exists in the mind of man, according to Daniel Dennett, this means you are shirking from the logic of “Darwin’s Dangerous Idea” which, according to him, is like a universal acid, eating away at our notions of purpose all the way up in regards to the universe and all the way down in regards to notions of personal identity, consciousness and intentionality. In other words, wherever there appears to be “purpose”, Darwin’s dangerous idea gives us every reason to think that science, perhaps on the part of you or one of your fellow neuroscientists, will show that purpose to have been merely epiphenomenal i.e. an illusion. Now, some would say Dennett and those like Dawkins who follow him are extremists, but he would say that people who say that, whether Stephen Jay Gould or Noam Chomsky, or perhaps you, are simply refusing to accept the full force of Darwin’s discovery.
If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it, is there a sound? No.
As perceivers we are all constrained by phenomenology.
Where is the totality of the universe? Between our ears.