Abstract
I propose an adaptationist theory of cosmological natural selection with intelligence (CNSI) that corrects an apparent error in Smolin’s theory of cosmological natural selection (Smolin’s CNS). Smolin’s CNS is a mostly reasonable extension of speculative yet conventional cosmological ideas, such as that we live in a multiverse and that black holes generate new universes by leading to big bang-like events. It extends these ideas by noting that if some universe types were particularly capable of producing new universes that were similar to themselves (i.e. at reproducing), then they would become particularly well represented in the multiverse; in other words, universes may evolve via Darwinian selection. Smolin’s CNS seems to err, however, in identifying black holes as the aspect of the universal ‘phenotype’ that is most likely to constitute an adaptation for universe reproduction. The error stems from overlooking what could be considered the ‘first law of Darwinian adaptation’: aspects of a phenotype that exhibit more improbable complexity are more likely to be adaptations. Because intelligent life exhibits higher improbable complexity (and therefore lower entropy) than black holes, it is more likely than black holes to be an adaptation for universe reproduction. From this perspective, biological evolution would represent a developmental subroutine of cosmological evolution, and the ultimate function of intelligent life would be to develop the knowledge and technology that would ultimately enable the universe to reproduce. This simple adaptationist correction to Smolin’s CNS produces a CNSI theory which more thoroughly explains the existence of complexity in our universe, because it directly accounts for not just non-biological order but biological order as well. Scientifically, the adaptationist framework of CNSI could be useful for facilitating conceptual integration between biology and physics. Philosophically, this framework is notable especially for implying that life serves a fundamental ‘purpose’ and that ‘moral progress’ can be objectively, if only broadly, defined.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Gould and Vrba (1982) propose ‘exaptation’ as another category of organismal trait. They define exaptation as a trait that has a function that it did not evolve to fulfil in the first place. This could be a by-product that is subsequently fashioned by selection to fulfil a function, but is more commonly conceived as an adaptation that evolved to fulfil one function and that then got co-opted by selection to fulfil a different function. For purposes of this chapter, however, so-called exaptations can be regarded as equivalent to adaptations. That is, the ‘adaptation’ category here includes all functional organismal traits and so subsumes the ‘exaptation’ category.
References
Alexander, R. D. (1987). The Biology of Moral Systems. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Banerjee, K., & Bloom, P. (2014). Why did this happen to me? Religious believers’ and non-believers’ teleological reasoning about life events. Cognition, 133(1), 277–303.
Bering, J. M. (2002). The existential theory of mind. Review of General Psychology, 6(1), 3–24.
Buss, D. M., Haselton, M. G., Shackelford, T. K., Bleske, A. L., & Wakefield, J. C. (1998). Adaptations, exaptations, and spandrels. American Psychologist, 53(5), 533.
Campbell, D. T. (1974). Evolutionary epistemology. In P.A. Schilpp (Ed.), The Philosophy of Karl R. Popper. The Library of Living Philosophers. Lasalle, IL: Open Court Publishing Company, Volume 14-1, 413–463.
Campbell, J. O. (2011). Universal Darwinism: The Path of Knowledge. s.l.: CreateSpace.
Campbell, J. O. (2015). Darwin Does Physics. s.l.: CreateSpace.
Campbell, J. O. (2016). Universal Darwinism as a process of Bayesian inference. Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 10.
Crane, L. (1994/2010). Possible implications of the quantum theory of gravity: an introduction to the meduso-anthropic principle. arXiv:hep-th/9402104v1. Reprinted in Crane, L. (2010). Possible implications of the quantum theory of gravity: an introduction to the meduso-anthropic principle. Foundations of Science, vol. 15, pp. 369–373.
Cziko, G. (1997). Without Miracles: Universal Selection Theory and the Second Darwinian Revolution. MIT Press.
Darwin, C. R. (1859). On the Origin of Species. London: John Murray.
Darwin, C. R. (1871). The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex. London: John Murray.
Dawkins, R. (1986). The Blind Watchmaker. New York: Norton.
Dennett, D. (1995). Darwin’s Dangerous Idea. New York: Schuster.
Evo Devo Universe (2017). Cosmological natural selection (fecund universes). Viewed 12 Oct. 2017 at http://evodevouniverse.com/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection_(fecund_universes).
Gardner, A. & Conlon, J. P. (2013). Cosmological natural selection and the purpose of the universe. Complexity 18: 48–56.
Gardner, J. N. (2000). The selfish biocosm. Complexity 5: 34–45.
Gardner, J. N. (2001). Assessing the robustness of the emergence of intelligence: Testing the selfish biocosm hypothesis. Acta Astronautica 48: 951–955.
Gardner, J. N. (2002). Assessing the computational potential of the eschaton – testing the selfish biocosm hypothesis. Journal of the British Interplanetary Society 55: 285–288.
Gardner, J. N. (2003). Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life is the Architect of the Universe. Inner Ocean Publishing.
Gardner, J. N. (2004). The physical constants as biosignature: An anthropic retrodiction of the selfish biocosm hypothesis. International Journal of Astrobiology 3: 229–236.
Gardner, J. N. (2005). Coevolution of the cosmic past and future: The selfish biocosm as a closed timelike curve: A recipe for cosmic ontogeny and a blueprint for cosmic reproduction. Complexity 10: 14–21.
Gardner, J. N. (2007). The Intelligent Universe: AI, ET, and the Emerging Mind of the Cosmos. New Page Books.
Garriga, J., Vilenkin, A., & Zhang, J. (2016). Black holes and the multiverse. Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics, 2016(02), 064.
Gould, S. J. & Vrba, E. S. (1982). Exaptation – a missing term in the science of form. Paleobiology 8 (1): 4–15.
Guth, A. H. (1981). Inflationary universe: A possible solution to the horizon and flatness problems. Physical Review D, 23(2), 347.
Hamilton, W. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behaviour I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, vol. 7, no. 1, pp. 1–16.
Harrison, E. R. (1995). The natural selection of universes containing intelligent life. Quarterly Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society 36: 193–203.
Heylighen F. (1999): “The Growth of Structural and Functional Complexity during Evolution”, in: F. Heylighen, J. Bollen & A. Riegler (eds.) The Evolution of Complexity (Kluwer Academic, Dordrecht), p. 17–44.
Heywood, B. T., & Bering, J. M. (2014). “Meant to be”: How religious beliefs and cultural religiosity affect the implicit bias to think teleologically. Religion, Brain & Behavior, 4(3), 183–201.
Jablonski, N. G., & Chaplin, G. (2010). Human skin pigmentation as an adaptation to UV radiation. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 107(Supplement 2), 8962–8968.
James, W. (1902). The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans, Green & Co.
Kurzweil, R. (2005). The Singularity is Near. London: Penguin.
Linde, A. D. (1986). Eternally existing self-reproducing chaotic inflationary universe. Physics Letters B, 175(4), 395–400.
Linde, A. (2017). A brief history of the multiverse. Reports on Progress in Physics, 80(2), 022001.
Norenzayan, A., & Lee, A. (2010). It was meant to happen: explaining cultural variations in fate attributions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98(5), 702.
Orr, H. A. (2000). Adaptation and the cost of complexity. Evolution, 54(1), 13–20.
Pinker, S. (2011). The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes. London: Penguin.
Price, M. E. (2017). Entropy and selection: Life as an adaptation for universe replication. Complexity, vol. 2017, Article ID 4745379, 4 pages, 2017. doi:https://doi.org/10.1155/2017/4745379
Schrödinger, E. (1944). What Is Life? The Physical Aspect of the Living Cell. Cambridge University Press.
Smart, J. M. (2009). Evo devo universe? A framework for speculations on cosmic culture. In Cosmos and Culture: Cultural Evolution in a Cosmic Context, S. J. Dick and M. L. Lupisella, Eds., pp. 201–295, Government Printing Office, NASA SP-2009-4802, Washington, DC.
Smolin, L. (1992). Did the universe evolve? Classical and Quantum Gravity, vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 173–191.
Smolin, L. (1997). The Life of the Cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press.
Smolin, L. (2006). The case for background independence. In Dean Rickles, Steven French, and Juha Saatsi (Eds.), The Structural Foundations of Quantum Gravity, pp. 196–239. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Susskind, L. (2004). Cosmic natural selection. arXiv:hep-th/0407266v1.
Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). The past explains the present: Emotional adaptations and the structure of ancestral environments. Ethology and Sociobiology, 11(4–5), 375–424.
Tooby J. & Cosmides L. (1992). The psychological foundations of culture. In The Adapted Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture, J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, Eds. Oxford University Press.
Turchin, P. (2016). Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth. Beresta Books.
Vidal, C. (2014). The Beginning and the End: The Meaning of Life in a Cosmological Perspective. Springer.
Wheeler, J. A. (1977). Genesis and observership. In Foundational Problems in the Special Sciences. Butts, R. E. & Hintikka, J. (Eds.), pp. 3–33. Dordrecht: Reidel.
Williams, G. C. (1966). Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton University Press.
Wright, R. (1999). Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny. Pantheon.
Zurek, W. H. (2003). Quantum Darwinism and envariance. arXiv:quant-ph/0308163.
Zurek, W. H. (2009). Quantum Darwinism. Nature Physics, 5(3), 181–188.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to John Smart and Clément Vidal for detailed comments on the manuscript, and thanks also to John Campbell, Georgi Yordanov Georgiev, Claudio Flores Martinez, and Jade Price.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2019 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Price, M.E. (2019). Cosmological Natural Selection and the Function of Life. In: Georgiev, G., Smart, J., Flores Martinez, C., Price, M. (eds) Evolution, Development and Complexity. Springer Proceedings in Complexity. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00075-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00075-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-00074-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-00075-2
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)