Cosmologists have mostly treated the universe as a rock — complex and beautiful, but shaped by arbitrary accidents. A fringe school of thought says it’s an egg: universes reproduce by spawning black holes, each offspring inheriting its parent’s physics with small variations, Darwin-style. Lee Smolin proposed the idea in 1992. It was ignored for a quarter century, until a novelist with a Substack and the James Webb Space Telescope gave it a second life.
The theory, called cosmological evolution:
- Smolin’s 1992 paper “Did the Universe Evolve?” argued cosmic natural selection favors universes that maximize black-hole production — so ours should look optimized for making black holes
- It extends an older speculation by Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler: the singularity inside a black hole could expand into a new universe with different physics
- Irish novelist Julian Gough — author of the poem that ends Minecraft — independently rediscovered the idea, took university astronomy courses, and published his Webb predictions on Substack four days before the telescope’s first data
- His prediction: the earliest supermassive black holes formed by direct gas collapse within ~100 million years of the Big Bang, then drove star and galaxy formation
- Webb delivered: galaxies assembling just 100 million years after the Big Bang, and a record-breaking massive black hole in a galaxy 470 million years old — findings mainstream models have called a “conundrum”
Why was the theory shelved for 25 years? Partly poor testability at the time, but also discipline: physicists were ill-equipped to judge Darwinian logic, and evolutionary biologists never encountered the idea. Gough argues Smolin’s theory was never falsified — it was just never properly engaged. It still needs quantum gravity to work, and critics note we can only observe one universe. But the episode is a neat case study in how science ignores plausible ideas until a telescope makes them hard to dismiss.