Difference between revisions of "Evolutionary cosmology"
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At the core of Evolutionary Cosmology is an exploration of the idea that our universe is the result of a modified Darwinian evolutionary process. As such it builds upon [[Cosmological natural selection (fecund universes)]] (CNS), or the fecund universes theory, first proposed by the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin in the 1990s, in his paper "Did the universe evolve?” (1992), and book The Life of the Cosmos (1997). It also incorporates further development of that theory in the 1990s and 2000s, by scholars such as Quentin Smith (1990), Stephen Hawking (1993), Edward Harrison (1995), Louis Crane (1994;2010), Clément Vidal (2010; 2014), John Smart (2009; 2012), James N. Gardner (2000; 2003), Rüdiger Vaas (2009), Michael Price (2019) and others, from various fields. Together they developed an evolutionary explanation for the appearance of intelligent life within the universe, in which intelligence acts as a nonrandom selection function, enhancing the reproductive success of the universe itself (as the unit of selection). | At the core of Evolutionary Cosmology is an exploration of the idea that our universe is the result of a modified Darwinian evolutionary process. As such it builds upon [[Cosmological natural selection (fecund universes)]] (CNS), or the fecund universes theory, first proposed by the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin in the 1990s, in his paper "Did the universe evolve?” (1992), and book The Life of the Cosmos (1997). It also incorporates further development of that theory in the 1990s and 2000s, by scholars such as Quentin Smith (1990), Stephen Hawking (1993), Edward Harrison (1995), Louis Crane (1994;2010), Clément Vidal (2010; 2014), John Smart (2009; 2012), James N. Gardner (2000; 2003), Rüdiger Vaas (2009), Michael Price (2019) and others, from various fields. Together they developed an evolutionary explanation for the appearance of intelligent life within the universe, in which intelligence acts as a nonrandom selection function, enhancing the reproductive success of the universe itself (as the unit of selection). | ||
This extension of CNS is called Cosmological Natural Selection Plus Intelligence (CNS+I). Included in such models is the assumption that end-of-universe intelligences are not omniscient or omnipotent, but remain finite systems with limited forward knowledge, and thus cannot fully optimize their future universal states, but must continue to make intelligence-guided guesses, under selection. Included in this are such ideas as the Transcension Hypothesis (Smart 2012), the Meduso-Anthropic Principle (L. Crane 1994), Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis (Gardner 2000), Cosmological Artificial Selection (Vidal 2010), Jeff Shainline’s (2020) Cosmological Selection for Technology, and perhaps even evolutionary variants of Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis (Bostrom 2003). Clement Vidal's The Beginning and the End (2014) gives a book-length account of CAS. | This extension of CNS is called Cosmological Natural Selection Plus Intelligence (CNS+I). Included in such models is the assumption that end-of-universe intelligences are not omniscient or omnipotent, but remain finite systems with limited forward knowledge, and thus cannot fully optimize their future universal states, but must continue to make intelligence-guided guesses, under selection. Included in this are such ideas as the Transcension Hypothesis (Smart 2012), the Meduso-Anthropic Principle (L. Crane 1994), Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis (Gardner 2000), Cosmological Artificial Selection (Vidal 2010), Jeff Shainline’s (2020) Cosmological Selection for Technology, and perhaps even evolutionary variants of Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis (Bostrom 2003). Clement Vidal's The Beginning and the End (2014) gives a book-length account of CAS. | ||
| − | Evolutionary Cosmology also explores the Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection model recently developed by Julian Gough in the early 2020s, which builds on this earlier work. This model proposes a developmental hierarchy of black-hole-directed universe formation, and proposes supermassive black holes as having a third, unique formation mechanism (direct collapse). This new approach generated a number of new predictions in 2022. Their subsequent confirmation by the James Webb Space Telescope greatly invigorated interest in cosmological natural selection. Also incorporated, and being actively explored, is Gough's 2025 Blowtorch Theory of structure formation in the early universe, which emerges directly from Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection, and which makes additional new predictions not made by the earlier versions of the theory. | + | Evolutionary Cosmology also explores the Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection model recently developed by Julian Gough in the early 2020s, which builds on this earlier work. This model proposes a developmental hierarchy of black-hole-directed universe formation, and proposes supermassive black holes as having a third, unique formation mechanism (direct collapse). This new approach generated a number of new predictions in 2022. Their subsequent confirmation by the James Webb Space Telescope greatly invigorated interest in cosmological natural selection. Also incorporated, and being actively explored, is Gough's 2025 [Blowtorch Theory https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-model] of structure formation in the early universe, which emerges directly from Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection, and which makes additional new predictions not made by the earlier versions of the theory. |
==The Problem Evolutionary Cosmology Solves== | ==The Problem Evolutionary Cosmology Solves== | ||
Revision as of 21:06, 19 February 2026
Evolutionary Cosmology (EvoCosmo) is an extremely new, fast-growing scientific field that takes ideas from evolutionary, developmental, and theoretical biology, plus systems theory and information theory, and applies them to cosmology, astronomy and astrophysics. (Those ideas and their application are described in more detail below.) In this, it shares much with the relatively young concept of Universal Darwinism, which explores Darwinian processes at all scales, from physics and chemistry to biology and culture: but in this case, applied to the universe itself as the unit of selection.
Contents
Cosmological Natural Selection
At the core of Evolutionary Cosmology is an exploration of the idea that our universe is the result of a modified Darwinian evolutionary process. As such it builds upon Cosmological natural selection (fecund universes) (CNS), or the fecund universes theory, first proposed by the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin in the 1990s, in his paper "Did the universe evolve?” (1992), and book The Life of the Cosmos (1997). It also incorporates further development of that theory in the 1990s and 2000s, by scholars such as Quentin Smith (1990), Stephen Hawking (1993), Edward Harrison (1995), Louis Crane (1994;2010), Clément Vidal (2010; 2014), John Smart (2009; 2012), James N. Gardner (2000; 2003), Rüdiger Vaas (2009), Michael Price (2019) and others, from various fields. Together they developed an evolutionary explanation for the appearance of intelligent life within the universe, in which intelligence acts as a nonrandom selection function, enhancing the reproductive success of the universe itself (as the unit of selection). This extension of CNS is called Cosmological Natural Selection Plus Intelligence (CNS+I). Included in such models is the assumption that end-of-universe intelligences are not omniscient or omnipotent, but remain finite systems with limited forward knowledge, and thus cannot fully optimize their future universal states, but must continue to make intelligence-guided guesses, under selection. Included in this are such ideas as the Transcension Hypothesis (Smart 2012), the Meduso-Anthropic Principle (L. Crane 1994), Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis (Gardner 2000), Cosmological Artificial Selection (Vidal 2010), Jeff Shainline’s (2020) Cosmological Selection for Technology, and perhaps even evolutionary variants of Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Hypothesis (Bostrom 2003). Clement Vidal's The Beginning and the End (2014) gives a book-length account of CAS. Evolutionary Cosmology also explores the Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection model recently developed by Julian Gough in the early 2020s, which builds on this earlier work. This model proposes a developmental hierarchy of black-hole-directed universe formation, and proposes supermassive black holes as having a third, unique formation mechanism (direct collapse). This new approach generated a number of new predictions in 2022. Their subsequent confirmation by the James Webb Space Telescope greatly invigorated interest in cosmological natural selection. Also incorporated, and being actively explored, is Gough's 2025 [Blowtorch Theory https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-blowtorch-theory-a-new-model] of structure formation in the early universe, which emerges directly from Three-Stage Cosmological Natural Selection, and which makes additional new predictions not made by the earlier versions of the theory.
The Problem Evolutionary Cosmology Solves
The development of Cosmological Natural Selection has been greatly hampered by the lack of an appropriate existing scientific field to explore it. As has been noted, those working on the theory and its implications come from a wide variety of fields: theoretical physics and cosmology (Smolin, Harrison), philosophy of science and astrobiology (Vidal), mathematics (Crane), evolutionary science (Price), systems theory (Smart), English literature and philosophy (Gough), astronomy (Harrison). It is hard to think of an area of study where publication has been more thoroughly dispersed (and thus diluted). Without a field devoted to the theory, there is no journal, formal or even informal, to consolidate publication and to disseminate relevant literature to interested scientists. Crucially, cosmologists have (perfectly understandably) no training in evolutionary biology, and most evolutionary biologists have never even heard of the theory. The two key fields are completely isolated from each other at the institutional level. As a result, exploration and development of Cosmological Natural Selection has been incoherent, intermittent, and piecemeal since 1990, usually carried out by individual scientists in their spare time, with little to no institutional support or understanding. Evolutionary Cosmology is an attempt to address this set of long-standing and mutually reinforcing problems, by bringing together interested scholars from these widely separated fields to collaborate, to share previously siloed knowledge, and ultimately to generate a new generation of scholars with the appropriate knowledge base to explore, develop, and validate this important new field.
A Process Cosmology
A key insight of evolutionary cosmology is that our universe behaves more like an egg than a rock, with the energy that moves through the system organising it into hierarchical (developmentally higher) levels of structured, orderly complexity over time, like an egg, rather than disordering it over time, like a rock. Evolutionary Cosmology posits that this is because a Darwinian evolutionary process at the level of universes has fine-tuned the basic parameters and initial conditions of physical and informational dynamics, and the relationships between them, so as to generate a highly reproductively successful universe, with three successive stages of black-hole coordinated reproduction, each of which evolved at a different point in the phylogenetic history of universes, and each of which is therefore more complex than the last. Just as in biology, ontogeny (emergence) does not fully recapitulate phylogeny (evolutionary history), but it does deeply rhyme with it, and occasionally add to it (Hall 2011). Each stage in our universe’s developmental history has been conserved, in some of its essentials, because each is needed to build on, and emerges from, the previous one. What we therefore see in our universe, since the Big Bang, is a complex, structured, multi-stage developmental process of self-complexification and self-organization. Evolutionary cosmology is thus a "process cosmology" (Davis, Teixeira, and Schwartz 2022), analogous to the process biology of Denis Noble, Stuart Kauffman, Peter Corning, and others (Corning et al. 2023). It is also a “systems cosmology,” modeling our universe as a system of complex adaptive subsystems, with each subsystem supported by networks and embedded in a selective environment. Most centrally, it is an “autopoietic cosmology.” The word autopoiesis incorporates two fundamental features of certain complex systems. They engage in a conserved and predictable life cycle (auto--intrinsically self-replicating and self-maintaining) and they simultaneously engage in a creative and unpredictable set of behaviors (poiesis--perennially creative). We can observe autopoetic processes, networks, and systems at all scales in our universe. Systems such as spiral galaxies repair and maintain themselves over time. Systems such as stars die and are replaced by new stars. Gases circulate, when they are near or within autopoetic systems, to where they may be used most efficiently. Under Evolutionary Cosmology, not just galaxies but the universe as a whole can be considered such an autopoietic system. Informational and Physical Processes. Both physical and informational processes have been proposed as central to process cosmology. In models like dual-aspect monism, each has been analyzed as a different lens on the same fundamental reality. Quantum information theorists, network information theorists, and others explore physical systems as computational, adaptive entities, with both unpredictable and predictable dynamics.
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