Earth's Organisms Developed Via Evolution. Some Theorists Wonder: What if the Entire Cosmos Did, Too?

Earth’s Organisms Developed Via Evolution. Some Theorists Wonder: What if the Entire Cosmos Did, Too? The idea that universes evolve like organisms sat on the fringes of theoretical physics for decades. Then, a Substack post and a 2022 find by the James Webb Space Telescope boosted the concept Eli Stark-Elster | AAAS Mass Media Fellow August 18, 2026 According to a niche perspective called “cosmological evolution,” universes may reproduce by spawning black holes in which new universes may form. The concept is far from proven, but researchers note its potential. NASA In the 1996 book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, the philosopher Daniel Dennett argues that evolution might be the best idea anyone ever came up with. “If I were to give an award,” Dennett writes, “I’d give it to Darwin, ahead of Newton and Einstein and everyone else.” Some physicists might disagree. Sure, evolution can explain how peacocks ended up with iridescent tail feathers and why chimpanzees look so much like humans. But can that really be called more significant than gravity? In Dennett’s view, Darwinism triumphs over the rest, because evolution is what he calls a “universal acid”—wherever we find complexity in nature, evolutionary theories tend to burn through our other explanations and reshape them into their own, unreasonably effective image. “Darwin’s idea had been born as an answer to questions in biology,” Dennett writes in the book. “But it threatened to leak out, offering answers—welcome or not—to questions in cosmology … and psychology.” In neuroscience, for instance, the universal acid has already eaten much of what stood in its path. A famous rule in the field, “neurons that fire together wire together,” posits that connections between neurons in the brain survive by repeating over time and outcompeting the less common paths—just as the theory of natural selection suggests that desirable traits in organisms outcompete less advantageous ones. But what about on universal scales? Could evolution really explain questions in cosmology? Proponents of a niche perspective called “cosmological evolution” argue that the answer may be yes. They claim that the nature of the cosmos follows the same Darwinian principles that have helped us understand the nature of peacock tails. Historically, scientists have viewed the cosmos as akin to a rock—complex, perhaps even beautiful, but formed through arbitrary events. Evolutionary cosmologists instead argue that universes, like living organisms, grow and reproduce, spinning off new universes with small variations from their progenitors. In doing so, these cosmic offspring are refined across generations into forms that maximize the number of universes yet to be born. Since the Big Bang, our universe, like any developing child, has been unfurling into an optimal shape. Under this view, the universe is not a rock. It is an egg. This analogy comes from Julian Gough, an Irish poet, novelist and musician best known for writing the short story that plays at the end of the video game “Minecraft.” He has recently become a public advocate for and scholar of cosmological evolution. Gough writes a Substack blog, The Egg and the Rock, where he publishes essays, personal updates and predictions about new data from the James Webb Space Telescope. Over a decade ago, Gough began wrestling with the question of why the complexity of our universe has increased over time. “It goes from … a ball of hot gas to building out structures like stars and galaxies,” he says. From there come planets and, on at least one of them, biological life. “That’s a very strange thing for hot gas to do.” Maybe, he wondered, the universe evolved into its current form. “It seemed to me an evolutionary explanation was the natural one,” he says. “In every sphere, when we discover a self-ordering, self-complexifying system, it turns out it’s had a previous evolutionary history. And why would that not apply to the universe itself?”Acknowledging his lack of expertise, Gough assumed someone else must have come up with the idea of an evolving cosmos before he did. A search through the scientific literature confirmed that someone had: Lee Smolin, a founding member of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Smolin’s work was, in turn, inspired by physicists Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler, who proposed that singularities inside black holes, the places where matter is crushed into a point of infinite density, might expand to produce new universes that follow different physics from the universes that produced them. Every universe—including our own—would, under this logic, have emerged from a Big Bang within a black hole. Smolin realized that this hypothetical process would allow universes to reproduce, in a way, by making more black holes. And if those new universes could inherit the physics of their parents with small differences—just as new organisms inherit the genes of their parents with small differences—then universes could also evolve with each generation. Specifically, a form of cosmic natural selection would favor universes that make as many black holes as possible. Less fertile universes could persist, but they would produce far fewer offspring. So over time, an increasingly high proportion of universes would be optimized for black hole production—which would imply that our universe, given the odds, is one of those. Smolin published his ideas in a 1992 paper titled “Did the Universe Evolve?” as well as a 1997 popular-science book called The Life of the Cosmos. Gough found both and read them excitedly. And yet, it seemed as though virtually nothing had come of Smolin’s ideas since. “Obviously,” says Gough, “[I thought] it must be wrong, because it had been 25 years and nobody seemed to be putting it forward as one of the possible mainstream explanations. Then I dug into the literature and realized—oh, my God—it hasn’t been falsified. It just hasn’t been engaged with properly at all.” Smolin’s theory had not completely vanished. Some futurist philosophers had extended the idea to explain the emergence of complex life from hot gas and stars. Humans exploit increasingly powerful energy sources, a progression they argued could culminate in artificial black holes. If those black holes spawned new universes, then a cosmos capable of producing technologically advanced life might produce more offspring. The progression from hot gas to stars, life and technology could, they proposed, be a product of cosmic natural selection. But academic cosmologists had largely ignored Smolin’s theory. Why? Kevin Kelly, the founding executive editor of Wired magazine and a former editor of the Whole Earth Review, says it might look like “kind of a crackpot thing at first.” But he began to consider the theory decades ago, while working on his 1992 book, Out of Control. “It seems very plausible to me,” Kelly says. “There’s a pattern here that seems it could scale, and it would be a mechanism” for producing cosmological complexity. The idea might have also suffered from poor P.R.—in the rare cases when it had been discussed in the mainstream, physicists had typically been the ones explaining the concepts. Gough argues that their unfamiliarity with evolutionary theory has led to a misunderstanding of Smolin’s idea. Meanwhile, evolutionary biologists, the people best equipped to assess its Darwinian logic, have barely encountered it. Perhaps most importantly, cosmic evolution did not make predictions that were easily testable at the time of its origin. But when Gough rediscovered the idea in the mid-2010s, that had changed: The upcoming launch of the James Webb Space Telescope was about to reshape the study of the universe’s first billion years. The device was designed to capture light from the early stages of the universe that had long been invisible to traditional telescopes. Given these improvements, Gough figured that Webb would create new opportunities to test cosmological evolution. But he didn’t have much time to spare: Gough wanted to publicize his predictions before the telescope returned its first batch of data. He began taking university astronomy courses and reading across cosmology, astrophysics and evolutionary biology, attempting to synthesize fields that had rarely been intertwined. His basic method for generating predictions was simple: “You’re just applying Darwin to universes. That’s all you’re doing,” he says. “If this is their mode of reproduction, what are the consequences?” If universes reproduce by forming black holes, Gough reasoned that the first universes would first have evolved the simplest and most efficient form of reproduction: “direct collapse.” Typical black holes form when massive stars collapse, but some cosmologists had proposed that the earliest supermassive black holes formed when primordial gas collapsed directly into giant black holes. Early in their development, living things often preserve and leverage the traits of their ancestors: For instance, gill-like folds in the necks of human fetuses, a remnant of our distant fish ancestors, develop into parts of the jaw, inner ear and throat. So Gough suspected that direct collapse black holes—as remnants of the most primitive ancestral universes—would appear early in our universe’s history and play an important role in its development. “It doesn’t require any complex structures,” he says. If this idea was correct, he predicted, the James Webb Space Telescope would see that supermassive black holes formed first in our universe’s history, then rapidly drove the formation of stars and galaxies around them. Gough predicted that this process would have begun within roughly the first 100 million years after the Big Bang.