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Thanks for the support... by the time you added that comment I'd changed the tautology para, and removed all the others so I'm not clear which ""current"" para you mean. Quite a lot of consilidation done tonight; I'm much happier with the current text than before. From my POV the main remaining problem is the lead paragraph which I hope the current text demonstates is seriously misleading. Here is my proposed new version:

In physics and cosmology, the anthropic principle was originally the rule of reasoning that we should take account of the constraints that our existence as observers imposes on the sort of universe that we could observe. The term has since been extended to cover supposed ""superlaws"" that in various ways require the universe to support intelligent life, usually assumed to be carbon-based, and occasionally to be specifically human beings. Anthropic reasoning involves assessing these constraints by analysing the properties of universes with different fundamental parameters or laws of physics from ours, and has frequently concluded that essential structures, from atomic nuclei to the whole universe, depend for stability on delicate balances between different fundamental forces; balances which only occur in a small minority of possible universes — so that ours seems to be  fine-tuned for life. Anthropic reasoning also attempts to explain and quantify this fine tuning. Within the scientific community the usual approach is to invoke selection effects from a real ensemble of alternate universes; competing strategies, occasionally also called anthropic, include intelligent Design. 
 
This would allow some shortening of the second para discussing controversies. You can see that I plan to have Anthropic reasoning re-direct to this page.  You can also see that I think we should avoid getting hung up on the tautologous nature of some statements of the AP (including the one you like), because I do think that misses the point.(c.f. new first para to the Character of Anthropic reasoning section). Oh, another proposal: merge the Bostrom section into the Variants, i.e. add his self sampling assumption as an AP-type statement. What do you think?  "