> I'm confused about the evolution example; it seems to me that evolution is something of a triumph of Occam's razor. After all, for all it's myriad complexity

> I'm confused about the evolution example; it seems to me that evolution is something of a triumph of Occam's razor. After all, for all it's myriad complexity the simple rule of natural selection explains pretty much all of it. The theory of natural selection is the simplest explanation to our observations of the fossil record, genetics, etc., not an explanation for why marine mammals evolved from hooved land mammals instead of fish directly - except in the most trivial sense of "it is because it is" (a la anthropological principle). Why did nature select for that path instead of the more direct one? We can't even begin to formulate that question for the universe and its laws as a whole. The laws of physics in this case are the mammals and the process of natural selection of universes (if there even is one) is a complete mystery because we don't have anything to compare it to establish probabilities. Whether that is even a valid question to ask is still in the realm of philosophy and Ivory tower theoretical physics.