Darwin’s theory of evolution , by explaining the appearance, change and disappearance of species, pointing to a common ancestor for all living beings on this planet, including humans, placed a philosophical term in the trigger: contingency . From this point of view the human being, like any other species, could not have appeared; we are here in a fluke. In fact, many argue that life itself is not an obligatory fact in the universe. Paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould made it abundantly clear in his book Full House : “The origin of Homo sapiens must be seen as something unrepeatable and concrete, not as an expected consequence.” However, there are scientists for whom chance is not the ultimate reason for our presence on Earth , that life and consciousness are a cosmic imperative. Let’s understand it correctly: they are not saying that both obey a divine plan but that they are a consequence of the laws of nature.
Among those who have worked most on this subject is one of the best astrophysicists of the last century, the Englishman Fred Hoyle, who drew attention to the peculiar coincidences existing in the values of the fundamental constants: all of them seemed to have been finely adjusted to allow the appearance of life . In particular, Hoyle found that for the carbon atom to be stable and not to disintegrate, a significant number of such peculiarities would have to have occurred on the atomic scale. This leads us to ask ourselves a disturbing question: Why do the fundamental physical constants have the value they have and not another? As we have already said, the underlying issue is not that they have the value we measure, but rather that it is precisely this value (and apparently it cannot be any other) that allows life to appear in the universe. In other words, if the charge of the electron or the speed of light were not worth what they are, life in the universe would probably be impossible.
And this fact is what drives theoretical physicists crazy.
Martin Rees, Britain’s Astronomer Royal, has written extensively about how everything in the universe, from the birth of galaxies to the origin of life on Earth, seems to be very sensitive to the values that seemingly arbitrary and unconnected natural constants, such as the strength of the force of gravity, the rate of expansion of the cosmos after the Big Bang, or the number of spatial dimensions of the world we live in. This has led to the formulation of the so-called Strong Anthropic Principle : the universe must have the necessary properties that allow the appearance of life and intelligence in some of its stages.
Other scientists go further.
Physicists John Barrow and Frank Tipler created the Omega Point theory , according to which the evolution of intelligent life, characterized by dedicating itself to storing an increasing amount of information, in the future will take control of the entire universe: it is the so-called Final Anthropic Principle . Needless to say, many scientists dismiss this idea as PACR, Completely Ridiculous Anthropic Principle. Unfortunately Tipler has failed to convince his colleagues of the validity of his idea that the laws of physics require a conscious observer in the future for every point in space-time.
Others are intrigued by nature’s apparent drive to increase its complexity and self-organize. One of the founders of the science of complexity, Stuart Kaufmann , has concluded that this propensity for self -organization is a basic attribute of matter itself , that this mysterious force that drives the appearance of ever more complicated systems can explain the speed at which evolution operates to bring organisms and entire ecosystems to ever more improbable levels of complexity: “there must be something like a fourth law (of Thermodynamics), a tendency for the self-construction of ever larger biospheres” Kaufmann comments. His idea is that the second law, which states that the disorder of a closed system always increases, is important but not decisive.
For the biochemist and Nobel laureate Christian De Duve , one of the most creative thinkers of the last century when it came to unifying biology and cosmology, the origin of life is not accidental, but the result of the most basic laws of nature: “ life and mind do not emerge as the result of random accidents, but as a natural manifestation of matter”. And not only that. For De Duve, consciousness is an expression of the Cosmos as fundamental as life itself. For his part, the former physicist and mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, Freeman Dyson, elevates the tendency of consciousness to exercise greater and greater control over inanimate matter to natural law and, following in the footsteps of Barrow and Tipler , believed that it will play a key role in the final destiny of the Cosmos.
But there are also other scientists who go the other way. For the quantum gravitation expert Lee Smolin , everything around us is the product of an evolutionary process operating on the largest possible scale. According to Smolin, new baby-universes are born inside black holes thanks to the Big Bangs that happen naturally inside. Now, the constants and laws of physics vary subtly from one baby-universe to another following a process of natural selection that favors the “reproduction” of universes that generate more baby-universes. Or what is the same, it favors universes in which there are stars that end their lives as black holes. For Smolin , life is nothing more than a by-product of the true objective of natural laws: to produce universes with black holes. Incidentally, the value of the universal constants that imply the existence of many black holes coincides precisely with the value that they must have for our universe to overflow with life. We are ‘collateral damage’.
But the one who has reflected the most on this matter is a curious character who has been a judicial clerk and senator from Oregon, James N. Gardner. Its core idea is the Selfish Biocosm Hypothesis , a cosmic-scale version of Richard Dawkins’ selfish gene theory. For Gardner, our universe, so well designed to accommodate life, is nothing more than the result of the evolution of a long series of previous universes, each one of which has been increasingly “friendly” to life. We are facing an evolutionary version of the strong anthropic principle. If so, there should be some kind of cosmic genetic code that would evolve following natural selection…
