I Suspect the Universe Has Grandmother's Eyes (or Empedocles vs. Fecund Universes)

Topics I like to read about and know nothing about.

The Cosmology of Natural Selection or "Fecund Universes" (Lee Smolin)
Theoretical physicist Lee Smolin proposed that the laws of physics are neither eternal nor fixed, but rather evolve biologically.

The Premise: Every time a black hole forms in our universe, a new "Big Bang" occurs in its interior, giving birth to a baby universe. The physical laws of the child universe undergo small "mutations" relative to the parent. Those universes whose laws favor the creation of more black holes have more "offspring," creating a process of Darwinian natural selection on a cosmic scale.

This is known as cosmological natural selection or the theory of fecund universes. Smolin proposed it in the early 1990s and developed it extensively in his book The Life of the Cosmos (1997).

Core Ideas

•    The "laws"—or, more precisely, the fundamental parameters of physics (coupling constants, particle masses, cosmological constant, etc.)—are neither fixed nor eternal; they can vary.
•    Every time a black hole forms, quantum gravity effects in its interior (where general relativity predicts a singularity) cause a "bounce" or a new Big Bang. Thus, a child universe is born, causally disconnected from our own.
•    In the transition from parent to child, the parameters undergo small random mutations (the idea of "reprocessing" laws had already been suggested by John Wheeler).
•    Universes whose laws produce more black holes have more "offspring." Over time, the population of universes becomes concentrated around parameter values that maximize black hole production (a local maximum in the "fitness landscape").

This offers a non-anthropic explanation for the apparent "fine-tuning" of physical constants: our universe is not fine-tuned for life, but rather to produce many black holes; life would be a byproduct of the conditions that also favor massive stars, supernovas, and gravitational collapse.
In short, it is one of the few proposals that attempts to apply a genuinely evolutionary mechanism (reproduction + variation + selection) to cosmology, rather than relying solely on the anthropic principle or a static multiverse generated by eternal inflation.
 

Empedocles, the Evolutionary Biologist Nobody Hired

While Lee Smolin needed general relativity, quantum gravity, and an entire book published in 1997 to suggest that the cosmos reproduces and mutates, a Sicilian reached a twin intuition twenty-four centuries earlier—without telescopes, without field equations, armed only with a wild imagination and the Greek habit of explaining everything by staring intently at the world until it confessed its secrets. Empedocles of Agrigento, in his poem On Nature, describes an origin of the animal world that seems ripped from a laboratory nightmare: in the early days, he says, the earth produced neckless heads, wandering arms lacking shoulders to support them, and solitary eyes roaming without a forehead in which to settle. All those loose parts, governed by the opposing forces of Love and Strife—which join and separate the elements again and again—combined at random, attempting impossible assemblies: creatures with double faces, beings with cattle heads and human torsos, monsters that the earth spat out without any master plan.
The majority of those combinations, Empedocles says, failed to survive: they couldn't feed, couldn't move, couldn't reproduce, and simply went extinct as quickly as they had appeared. Only those combinations remained that, by pure assembly accident, turned out to be viable. There was no designer, no master plan, no cosmic architect drawing sketches of a cow before releasing it into the world: there was trial, error, and the ruthless accounting of what works well enough to keep existing for a little while longer.
The parallel with Smolin takes very little translation effort. Where Empedocles has animal parts combining at random and only the viable ones surviving, Smolin has entire universes—with their own "parts," which are the physical constants—combining at random at every black hole bounce, and only those whose configuration produces more black holes surviving (that is, reproducing). Swap "neckless heads" for "cosmological constant," swap "wandering arms" for "quark mass," and you have the exact same mechanism: blind variation plus selection by viability, with no external tuner calibrating anything in advance. The only difference is that the court of history remembers Empedocles as a semi-legendary poet-philosopher who threw himself into a volcano to prove he was a god, while Smolin gets invited to theoretical physics conferences. At its core, the mechanism they propose is identical: the universe wasn't designed to work. Quite simply, what didn't work was no longer around to tell the tale.
 

The Committee of Paternity Test Experts (or Why the Universe Will Never Be on "Life Swap")

The first objection raised against Smolin was, deep down, the most devastating of all, and it sounds like the title of an afternoon talk show: there is no DNA test to prove the parentage. The entire theory hinges on the child universe inheriting, with slight variations, the parent universe's information through the black hole. The problem is that, according to what is known about these beasts today, information is neither lost nor transmitted to the other side: it stays behind, entangled and encoded on the event horizon itself, like those relatives who swear they'll WhatsApp you your inheritance, but nothing ever shows up in the chat. If there is no transfer, there is no inheritance; and without inheritance, there is no "taking after the grandmother"—there is, at best, an utterly unrelated baby someone left on the doorstep with no explanation whatsoever.
Then came the awkward relative's comment at the family dinner—the one who always ruins the toast with an ill-timed fact: if what really matters is manufacturing the greatest possible number of black holes, it would have been enough to bump up the cosmological constant just a bit, and boom, production would skyrocket. That is to say, our universe—the one supposed to be a successful specimen, selected over generations of cosmic trial and error—could, with a minimal tweak, have had vastly more "children" than it actually did. Like the student who graduates with passing marks and then realizes they would have scored far better by studying just a bit more: they didn't fail, but they aren't exactly the model student the theory required to work.
And as if that weren't enough, someone ran the numbers properly: our universe doesn't even come close to the theoretical maximum of black holes it could produce under a different combination of parameters. It is like entering a marathon, finishing in a discretely mediocre spot, and demanding the gold medal because "in theory, you ran well enough to have won in another universe." Evolutionary genetics doesn't operate on intentions or potential; it operates on results, and the results here look more like a local daycare league than the Olympic championship.
Nor did it help when someone asked, with the worst of intentions, whether there is even real sibling competition in this cosmic family. In classic natural selection, organisms compete for food, territory, and mates—limited resources in the same place at the same time. Here, by contrast, each universe is born, grows, and mutates completely isolated from its siblings, never crossing paths, never fighting over anything—like cousins living in different countries who never speak, yet someone still tries to place them on the same competitive family tree. And to top it off, no one has yet managed to explain the exact physical mechanism by which the mass of a black hole—so tiny, comparatively speaking—ends up generating an entire Big Bang on the other side. It is the cosmic equivalent of promising that the loose change in the jar will buy you a house: a nice gesture, but when anyone sits down to do the math seriously, it simply doesn't add up.
In the end, even the most concrete prediction the theory dared to make—a mass limit for neutron stars, akin to putting in writing the maximum weight allowed for a family member—ended up bumping into real-world relatives who weigh considerably more than permitted. Like that family bet where someone confidently claims "the baby won't grow past five foot seven," only for the relative in question to blow past it by several inches without asking anyone's permission.

Giordano Bruno's Closing Argument

The committee of experts was already packing up its folders, satisfied with having caught the cosmic genealogy offside. Empedocles, who had presented his theory with the calm of someone long accustomed to being called mad, adjusted his cloak to leave without much drama—after all, he had already jumped into a volcano once; an academic critique wasn't going to shake his ground. And Smolin, off in some corner, calculator still in hand, kept arguing that the neutron star limit "depended on the nuclear equation of state, which still holds uncertainty," carrying the exact expression of someone insisting the scale is poorly calibrated.
That was when he entered, walking at the hurried pace of someone who has spent all eternity trying to finish a sentence before being interrupted again: Giordano Bruno, still smelling of firewood, eyes burning with the glare of one who paid with his entire body for refusing to dial down his convictions.
"Family, family, family!" he exclaimed, skipping any greeting, like someone resuming an argument that started four hundred years ago and has no intention of letting it cool off. "You argue over whether there's DNA, whether there's information transfer, whether the black hole passes down the inheritance to the child or not. I told you back in 1584, in On the Infinite Universe and Worlds: there is no single world; there are infinitely many, and each engenders others in its image, with their own stars, their own suns, their own fury. And you ask me for a notarized certificate to believe they resemble one another?"
A physicist on the committee, folder still tucked under his arm, attempted to object: "With all due respect, without a proven transfer mechanism, there is no way to maintain the kinship."
"Mechanism?" Bruno let out a laugh that sounded more like a crackling bonfire than a chuckle. "I had no telescope, no field equation, nothing of what you possess, yet I saw with absolute clarity that the universe could not be a solitary exception, a child without siblings, an unrepeatable experiment of a bored God. I saw worlds born from other worlds like sparks flying from a fire, without any need for someone to sign a birth certificate. Nature doesn't ask permission from genetics to resemble itself. It repeats because it is fertile, because it cannot help itself, because fecundity is its very mode of being—with or without a DNA chain of custody."
Empedocles, who until then had been listening with the smile of a grandfather watching a grandson defend the very idea he had centuries ago, added his part: "I didn't need a mechanism either. I saw arms without shoulders, heads without necks, failed attempts everywhere, and right up until—" he cut himself off, smiling: "Sorry, I got distracted. What I meant to say is: you don't need to explain to me how a black hole passes the torch to its child. It is enough for me to see that the pattern repeats: trial, error, what doesn't work disappears, what works remains. That doesn't require a notary."
The committee, uncomfortable, wasn't quite sure what to write in its report. Because there was no way to refute someone who never claimed to offer empirical proof: Bruno hadn't come to win the argument with data; he came to insist that the intuition of infinite fecundity does not need to await the verdict of a laboratory to feel true. And perhaps right there, in that exact spot, lies the point none of the critics managed to touch: the universe doesn't need its DNA paperwork in order for someone, looking at it with enough patience, to swear they recognize in it—if only a little—its grandmother's eyes.

And so the cosmos—among the scattered parts of a Sicilian, the calculator of a stubborn physicist, and the fiery faith of a heretic who burned for believing in infinite worlds—continues to have children that resemble it, with or without a birth certificate to prove it.
 

Transparency note: Original idea with text generated by AI and revised by me. Used Gemini, Claude, and Grok.