Carter’s paper emphasized the importance of paying heed to such bias, an accounting he called the anthropic principle (an unfortunate name, because the idea would apply equally well to any form of intelligent life that makes and analyzes observations, not just to humans). No one took exception to this element of Carter’s argument. The controversial part was his suggestion that the anthropic principle might cast its net not just over things in the universe, like planetary distances, but over the universe itself.
