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by GorgeRonde 4325 days ago
This tends to confirm Lee Smolin's embryo-theory of cosmological natural selection.

Source : http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selectio...

Cosmological natural selection Smolin's hypothesis of cosmological natural selection, also called the fecund universes theory, suggests that a process analogous to biological natural selection applies at the grandest of scales. Smolin published the idea in 1992 and summarized it in a book aimed at a lay audience called The Life of the Cosmos.

The theory surmises that a collapsing[clarification needed] black hole causes the emergence of a new universe on the "other side", whose fundamental constant parameters (masses of elementary particles, Planck constant, elementary charge, and so forth) may differ slightly from those of the universe where the black hole collapsed. Each universe thus gives rise to as many new universes as it has black holes. The theory contains the evolutionary ideas of "reproduction" and "mutation" of universes, and so is formally analogous to models of population biology.

The resulting population of universes can be represented as a distribution of a landscape of parameters where the height of the landscape is proportional to the numbers of black holes that a universe with those parameters will have. Applying reasoning borrowed from the study of fitness landscapes in population biology, one can conclude that the population is dominated by universes whose parameters drive the production of black holes to a local peak in the landscape. This was the first use of the notion of a landscape of parameters in physics.

Leonard Susskind, who later promoted a similar string theory landscape, stated:

"I'm not sure why Smolin's idea didn't attract much attention. I actually think it deserved far more than it got."

1 comments

It seems like the proposed cosmological natural selection is fundamentally different from biological natural selection in the sense that there is no actual pruning. That is to say that given a universe all of its children will survive and reproduce based solely on their laws of physics, independent of what all the other universes do. This would mean that all possible universes which could be reached through this mechanism will be reached, wheras in evolution as it happens on Earth, most of the potential organisms never exist because there ancestor got out-competed at some point.