What if the entire cosmos developed via evolution?

An accessible write-up of Lee Smolin’s cosmological natural selection, first set out in a 1992 paper and expanded in The Life of the Cosmos in 1997, building on earlier work by Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler.

The idea is that universes reproduce through black holes: a singularity spawns a new universe with slightly different physical constants, and over many generations selection favours whatever produces the most black holes. It gives an answer to why the constants look tuned that needs neither a designer nor an anthropic shrug, and it is falsifiable in principle, since our universe should be near a local optimum for black hole production.

The line the piece ends on is the one worth keeping: this makes the universe an egg rather than a rock, something that unfolds into more complex forms rather than merely sitting there having been formed. Speculative, and treated as such by most physicists, but a genuinely interesting shape of explanation.