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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
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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?”
Did you know? What is the multiverse?
The multiverse is a hypothetical idea that our universe is just one of many that exist, and there may be an infinite number of universes. The concept has been explored widely in science fiction—from the Marvel franchise to the Academy Award-winning Everything Everywhere All at Once—but theoretical physicists have also been examining the idea to explain our reality.
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.
On July 8, 2022, four days before Webb released its first data, Gough published his predictions on Substack. Already aware that his amateur background might make him sound unreliable, he feared being publicly wrong. “I was really terrified,” he says. “This could be fantastically humiliating.”
Fortunately for Gough, the results were the opposite. Webb found galaxies forming earlier, faster and in a more orderly manner than standard physics models had anticipated. In November 2022, NASA reported evidence that some galaxies had begun assembling only about 100 million years after the Big Bang, while follow-up observations of a galaxy just 470 million years after the event found an unusually massive black hole—nearly as massive as all the stars surrounding it.
In a 2025 paper published in the Astrophysical Journal, scientists described these discoveries as a “conundrum [that is] part of the larger challenge to understand the stunning prevalence of massive structures and galaxies in the first few 100 million years after the Big Bang.”
“You have these headlines saying physics is completely baffled by these early and self-organizing things,” says Johannes Jäger, an evolutionary systems biologist and philosopher at the Complexity Science Hub in Vienna. But Gough, Jäger adds, “actually predicted” them. “If somebody would take up his ideas and test them and put them in a peer-reviewed format, then it would get the attention maybe that it deserves,” Jäger says.
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Since making those predictions, Gough has received funding from grant programs like Emergent Ventures and O’Shaughnessy Ventures, as well as support from Christopher Fields, a biophysicist affiliated with Tufts University’s Allen Discovery Center, and Tufts biological theorist Michael Levin. “I think it’s a fresh approach that should be looked at,” Levin says. “He’s convinced me that it’s worth exploring this idea.”
Stephon Alexander, a cosmologist and theoretical physicist at Brown University, describes cosmological evolution as “a beautiful idea” and “a nice mechanism.” He notes that the standard framework of cosmology might also be able to account for the early formation of massive black holes and galaxies. However, Alexander cautions that those conventional models do not yet offer “a complete story” either. “So, we have to keep an open mind,” he says.
He suggests the main challenge remaining for the cosmic evolution theory is not merely finding other evidence but making the idea consistent with established physics. “It has to be embedded somehow,” he says, “and then shown to be either consistent with it or inconsistent.”
Cosmological evolution would need to explain how black holes, which appear to crush everything inside them into an infinitely dense point, could produce universes inside of them that expand outward, like ours. Some recent research does indicate that our own universe might reside in a black hole. A 2025 study by computer scientist Lior Shamir considered 263 spiral galaxies identified in Webb imaging and determined that 158 of them appeared to rotate clockwise as seen from Earth, while 105 appeared to rotate counterclockwise. In a random universe, a roughly equal number of galaxies would rotate each direction. The bias toward clockwise rotation, Shamir proposes, could indicate that our universe resides in a spinning black hole that has preferentially passed on its rotation to many of the galaxies inside it. However, the paper also notes that the Milky Way’s own rotation might explain the results.
Along with better evidence that expanding universes can form inside black holes, cosmological evolution would need to work out how black holes might pass on the laws of physics, with some modifications, to the next generation of universes. “The only game in town to understand that is quantum gravity,” Alexander says. And scientists haven’t reached an explanation of that game yet.
Ultimately, the problem with trying to prove ideas about a multiverse is that scientists can “only observe and draw conclusions from the single universe we happen to live in,” as German cosmologist Jenny Wagner told the Irish Times last year. That creates a limited perspective, she said, “like studying medicine on a single patient.”
But even the standard model of cosmology contains major unknowns. Dark matter is currently used to explain gravitational effects that visible matter alone cannot account for, while dark energy is assumed to drive the accelerating expansion of the universe. Both concepts have proved useful, but scientists have no major insights into their true nature. “The standard model of cosmology works well—but only by introducing new ingredients we have never observed directly,” Enrique Gaztañaga, a cosmologist at England’s University of Portsmouth and co-author of a study that argues our universe emerged inside a black hole, wrote for the Conversation last year.
With these ideas, physicists have gotten themselves into a “dead end,” Wagner told the Irish Times. “We need a more open-minded dialogue between mainstream and unconventional lines of research to escape.”
Gough admits that collecting direct evidence for cosmological evolution is difficult. But he says Webb’s discoveries of structures predicted by the model offer “excellent circumstantial evidence.”
The observations made so far suggest that the early universe was stranger and more complex than previously assumed. But whether black holes can actually spawn universes and transmit their physics to them is still unknown. “These questions … need to be hardened into a serious investigation of how these patterns come about,” says Jäger. According to Alexander, evidence that a black hole can “birth a new space-time or universe” would be “a telltale sign” that cosmological evolution is correct.
For now, the theory’s strongest appeal may be the reach of the idea behind it. Evolution “is always the best explanation,” Gough says, when asked about Dennett’s framing of evolution as a universal acid. “He’s correct. … Why wouldn’t it apply to universes when it applies to everything else?”
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