The maths underpinning Darwin’s theory of natural selection could explain how the universe may be “designed” to make black holes.
New Oxford University research builds on the “cosmological natural selection hypothesis” — an idea first put forward in the 1990s to explain the apparent “fine-tuning” of the universe’s basic parameters to allow for the existence of atoms, galaxies, and life itself.
Cosmological natural selection proposes that, if new universes are born inside black holes, a “multiverse” of many possible universes could be shaped by a process similar to natural selection so that successive generations of universes evolve to make better black holes.
Andy Gardner and Joseph Conlon found that evolutionary genetics’ Price’s theorem can capture the process of cosmological natural selection and explain how the universe seems designed for the purpose of making black holes rather like a fish can seem “designed” to swim underwater.