Cosmic Evolution: The Theory That Universes Evolve Like Organisms Gains Ground
Earth's organisms developed via evolution. What if the cosmos did, too?
A fringe theory called cosmological evolution suggests that universes reproduce by spawning black holes, which give rise to new universes with slight variations. Inspired by Darwinian natural selection, this idea could explain the universe's increasing complexity. After decades of neglect, a Substack post by writer Julian Gough and early James Webb Space Telescope findings have revived interest, as observations of surprisingly early galaxies align with predictions made by the theory's proponents.
It goes from … a ball of hot gas to building out structures like stars and galaxies. That's a very strange thing for hot gas to do.
- gmuslera
Where is the replicator? Evolution doesn’t happen just because. Copies are made, not all identical, some get to the next iteration, and if what makes them different gives them better chances to get to the next stage, then that difference may remain.
Where that plays with universes?
I get that if they are infinite amounts of universes, the ones with conditions of evolving intelligence hace more chances to be observed from within, but more or less that’s it.
- dang
Last year's thread (mentioned in OP's text above):
The Blowtorch Theory: A new model for structure formation in the universe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44115973 - May 2025 (170 comments)
- kwamenum86
Evolution is the only universal principle. Governs everything that happens in our reality and all realities. Gets really trippy when you consider the ways in which evolution itself evolves - that largely explains the biodiversity we see on earth
Check out The Case Against Reality for more color
- chistev
I think it was in the book Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan where I read that why the planets orbit in circular motion is because they are the planets that survived what must have been a chaotic early universe.
In the early universe, those planetary bodies must have been moving in different ways and colliding into one another, and the rate of collisions must have been very high.
Ultimately, the constant collisions led to eventual clearing off of bodies that did not move in circular motion, and that's what we see today. A natural selection of objects of the cosmos.
I might be misremembering Carl Sagan's description. But I'm almost certain I read this in Pale Blue Dot. I keep meaning to re-read that book.
- qsera
I am a total layman. But I believe that MUH (Max Tegmark) is the real thing.
I was once looking at fractal animations on youtube. At one point, I thought I saw things move in it in a way that resembles physical movement. That caused me to ask if there could be a fractal where things moved or behaved in accordance with the physical laws of our universe (As I pursued this idea, I came across MUH from Tegmark [1]). And if such a fractal (or a mathematical structure) exhaustively implements all our physical laws, it follows that we will observe eventual emergence of consciousness life.
Of course, random events should also occur to support emergence of life. The randomness that one observe in such a world would also be a deterministic property of the structure it inhabits. So slightly different structures could only differ in a single random event. Thus it follows that there are variant structures where any random events (apart from the deterministic physical laws) manifest.
Thus it follows that if live in our universe is the result of the physical laws of this universe, and some set of random events, there will be a mathematical structure as I described above, where this manifests.
I like or believe this idea because it, in one fell swoop, answers all the difficult and seemingly unanswerable questions like Who created the universe, or Why do we exist or What is the purpose of existence or What was there before the universe etc etc...