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

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. 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. 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. 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. From there come planets and, on at least one of them, biological life.