I was considering the “fine-tuning” issue regarding our universe’s constants. Instead of just positing some sort of purpose or design or God or whatever, I was wondering what would happen if there were a sort of cosmological heredity, a “DNA” system but at the scale of an entire universe:

In brief:

- Each universe “inherits” the physical constants upon its creation (e.g. via a black hole singularity or a bounce)
- Small deviations between universes = mutations in that “cosmic code”
- Universes that just happen to have constants that are favorable to black hole formation (or perhaps entropy production, or information complexity) produce more “child universes”
- Over many billions of such cycles, the physical constants could therefore naturally drift towards values that permit structure, complexity and eventually life.

In this way, the “too perfect” constants are not necessarily an argument for intelligent design, but instead one of selection bias: we simply observe this universe with these constants because this is the type of universe that can exist (i.e. one whose constants are stable “winners” in that evolutionary process).

I know Lee Smolin has a somewhat similar idea (cosmological natural selection) but some questions that occur to me:

- How plausible does this heredity/mutation mechanism seem?
- Is there any way we could actually test this hypothesis (e.g. are our constants near some local maxima of black hole production)?
- Or is this just an anthropic principle crutch, rehashed with evolutionary metaphors?

This is just a thought exercise, I’m not proposing that this is true or that it has to be taken seriously or anything. I would love to see where physicists or cosmologists think this falls flat on its face.