Questions and Answers


Question: What is the basic idea expressed in BIOCOSM?

The basic idea is that life and intelligence are the primary cosmic phenomena and that everything else—the constants of nature, the dimensionality of the universe, the origin of carbon and other elements in the hearts of giant supernovas, the pathway traced by biological evolution—is secondary and derivative. According to this theory, the emergence of life and intelligence are not meaningless accidents in a hostile, largely lifeless cosmos but at the very heart of the vast machinery of creation, cosmological evolution, and cosmic replication.

Question: How does that idea fit into current mainstream thinking about the nature of the universe?

We have entered an exciting era of precision cosmology. New tools like the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) are permitting scientists to study the universe and its origin with unprecedented clarity. While the experimental results are unambiguous, their implications are startling and disconcerting. For instance, the WMAP measurements reveal that the cosmos is composed predominantly of a mysterious “dark energy” that acts like anti-gravity. The problem is that no one has the slightest clue about the nature of dark energy. Another problem is that the closer we examine the details of the natural laws and constants that govern the behavior of every object in the universe, the more it appears that those laws and constants have been mysteriously fine-tuned to be life-friendly. BIOCOSM attempts to unravel this particular mystery.

Question: What is the “hidden” role of the laws and constants of nature under the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis?

Under the hypothesis, the capacity of the universe to generate life and to evolve ever more capable intelligence is encoded as a hidden subtext to the basic laws and constants of nature, stitched like the finest embroidery into the very fabric of our universe. The oddly life-friendly laws of nature that prevail in our cosmos serve a function precisely equivalent to that of DNA in living creatures on Earth, providing a recipe for development of a living universe and a blueprint for the construction of offspring (so-called “baby universes”).

Question: How does your work on this hypothesis differ from that of scientists in more traditional settings?

My role, at least as I perceive it, is not to serve as an experimentalist or a number-cruncher but rather as a synthesizer of a host of emerging ideas now being advanced in a variety of seemingly unrelated scientific fields, including cosmology, astrobiology, M-theory, artificial life, and evolutionary theory. I have endeavored to extract key insights from these disparate disciplines in order to “connect the dots” and map out a plausible scientific explanation for the inexplicably life-friendly quality of the physical laws and constants that prevail in our universe—a dazzlingly improbable feature of the cosmos that poses, as Paul Davies says, “the biggest of the Big Questions.” The very fact that I am an outsider from the viewpoint of the scientific establishment means that I am not captive to the paradigms and prejudices of a particular discipline. This is a weakness inasmuch as I lack the depth of expertise in cosmology possessed by traditional astrophysicists like Andrei Linde and Neil Turok. But it is also a key advantage because, as a synthesizer and a scientific generalist, I was able to formulate a “crude look at the whole,” in the wonderful phrase of Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann. My approach also happens to coincide with the methodology of complexity theory, the field of science with which I am most comfortable and in which I have published.

Question: What do mainstream scientists think of BIOCOSM?

BIOCOSM has received lavish and outspoken praise from some of the top cosmologists, physicists, and mathematicians in the world, including UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees, Paul Davies, John Casti, and Seth Shostak. Others have commented that the ideas advanced in the book are impermissibly speculative or impossible to verify. A few have hurled what scientists view as the ultimate epithet—that my theory constitutes “metaphysics” instead of genuine science! I beg to differ.



Question: What prominent thinkers have advanced ideas similar or related to those put forward in BIOCOSM?

UK Astronomer Royal Martin Rees; British astrophysicist John Barrow; physicists Freeman Dyson and John Wheeler; cosmologists Lee Smolin, Paul Davies, and Frank Tipler; evolutionary theorist and Nobel laureate Christian de Duve; evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis, Harold Morowitz and Simon Conway Morris; complexity theorists Stuart Kauffman and Stephen Wolfram; French religious philosopher Teilhard de Chardin; popular science author Robert Wright; computer theorist Ray Kurzweil; and, to some degree, Stephen Hawking.

Question: How does BIOCOSM treat Darwin’s theory of evolution?

Under the “Selfish Biocosm” hypothesis articulated in BIOCOSM, the immense saga of biological evolution on Earth is a minor sub-routine in the inconceivably lengthy process through which the universe becomes increasingly pervaded with ever more intelligent life. Thus, BIOCOSM does not argue against Darwinism but seeks to place it in a cosmic context in which life and intelligence play a central role in the process of cosmogenesis. Put differently, the hypothesis reconceives the process of earthly phylogeny as a minuscule element of a vastly larger process of cosmic ontogeny.

Question: What are the religious implications of the hypothesis?

The hypothesis is inconsistent with traditional monotheistic notions of an unknowable supernatural Creator. Freeman Dyson has famously written that the idea of sufficiently evolved mind is indistinguishable from the mind of God. The Selfish Biocosm hypothesis takes Dyson’s assertion of equivalence one step further by suggesting that there is a discernible and comprehensible evolutionary ladder by means of which mortal minds will one day ascend into the intellectual stratosphere that will be the domain of superminds—what Dyson would call the realm of God. To use Dyson’s terminology, the hypothesis implies that the mind of God is the natural culmination of the evolution of the mind of humans and other intelligent creatures throughout the universe, whose collective efforts conspire, admittedly without any deliberate intention, to effect a transformation of the cosmos from lifeless dust to vital, living matter capable of the ultimate feat of life-mediated cosmic reproduction.

Question: Is BIOCOSM really just a religious screed in disguise—a subtle form of creationism or “intelligent design” proselytizing like Michael Behe’s Darwin’s Black Box?

Definitely not. BIOCOSM is adamantly and consistently naturalistic in focus. The ideas that underlie the book—including the radical “Selfish Biocosm” hypothesis—were originally presented in prestigious peer-reviewed scientific journals (Complexity, Acta Astronautica, and the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society). Indeed, the prime objective of the book is to provide the framework for a scientifically plausible and testable formulation of the strong anthropic principle—the notion that life and intelligence have not emerged in a series of random accidents but are essentially hard-wired into the laws of nature and into a vast cycle of cosmic creation, evolution, death and rebirth.

Question: Are there immediate and long-term implications of your book?

I don’t have a crystal ball but this is what I hope. I hope that it will encourage more scientists (both professionals and amateurs) to think holistically about the challenge of deciphering what the late physicist Heinz Pagels called the cosmic code—the full suite of life-friendly laws and physical constants that prevail in our universe. I hope it will provoke students of science to recall, in the spirit of Newton, that our minuscule island of scientific knowledge is surrounded by a fathomless ocean of undiscovered truth. And I hope that it will rekindle the sense of wonder at the achievements of science so perfectly captured by the great British innovator Michael Faraday when he summarily dismissed skepticism about his almost magical ability to summon up the genie of electricity simply by moving a magnet in a coil of wire. As Faraday noted, “Nothing is too wonderful to be true if it be consistent with the laws of nature.”