Wednesday, May 29, 2013

Cosmological natural selection

Here's an interesting hypothesis the researcher Lee Smolin calls "cosmological natural selection." Here's a quote from the article where he's asked a question about looking at universe formation and black holes in a Darwinian, evolutionary context. Pretty interesting thought experiment:

John Wheeler had already speculated that when this happens, the laws of nature are reborn again, in the new baby universe; he called it reprocessing the universe. What I had to add to this to make it work like a model of natural selection, was that the changes passed form parent to child universe are very slight so there can be an accumulation of fitness. This hypothesis leads to the conclusion that assuming our universe is a typical member of this population of universes as it develops after many, many generations, that the universe is going to be finely tuned to produce many black holes.
Anyhow, I thought it was an interesting perspective with interesting conclusions.

No comments: