Cosmological Natural Selection

Cosmological natural selection is Smolin's proposed answer to the fine-tuning problem: why do the physical constants of our universe take values that permit the formation of stars, heavy elements, chemistry, life, and consciousness? The standard responses — anthropic reasoning and the string theory landscape — are, Smolin argues, either empty or non-explanatory. His alternative applies the logic of Darwinian selection to cosmology. Black holes, which form from the collapse of massive stars, produce (on this hypothesis) new regions of spacetime — baby universes — in which the physical constants are slightly different from those of the parent. Universes whose constants favor black hole production produce many offspring; those whose constants disfavor it produce few. Over cosmological time, the population of universes comes to be dominated by constants that maximize black hole production. And the constants that maximize black hole production happen to be the same constants that produce complexity: massive stars, heavy elements, complex chemistry,