James Gardner: The Selfish Biocosm

There is a great interview with James Gardner in the new issue of What Is Enlightenment? In the interview, he touches on his new work, which is nothing less than revolutionary for a hard scientist. He is proposing a "Selfish Biocosm" theory, an approach that he describes as follows:

[The "Selfish Biocosm" provides] the foundation for a scientifically plausible version of the "strong anthropic principle"—the notion that the physical laws and constants of nature are cunningly structured in such a way as to coax the emergence of life and intelligence from inanimate matter.

The theory is oultined in his book, Biocosm: The New Scientific Theory of Evolution: Intelligent Life is the Architect of the Universe.

He explains his basic approach in the Introduction to Biocosm:

The fourth part of the book puts forward my new Selfish Biocosm hypothesis: that the anthropic qualities that our universe exhibits can be explained as incidental consequences of an enormously lengthy cosmic replication cycle in which a cosmologically extended biosphere provides the means by which our cosmos duplicates itself and propagates one or more "baby universes." The hypothesis suggests that the cosmos is "selfish" in the same metaphorical sense that evolutionary theorist and ultra-Darwinist Richard Dawkins proposed that genes are "selfish." Under my theory, the cosmos is "selfishly" focused upon the overarching objective of achieving its own replication. To use the terminology favored by economists, self-reproduction is the hypothesized "utility function" of the universe.

An implication of the Selfish Biocosm hypothesis is that the emergence of life and ever more accomplished forms of intelligence is inextricably linked to the physical birth, evolution, and reproduction of the cosmos. This section also provides a set of falsifiable implications by means of which the new hypothesis may be tested.

Here is a bit from the interview in What Is Enlightenment?

So my theory is that the physcial laws and constants have at least two functions. The first is the commonly accepted function, which is to govern the physical movement of bodies and particles and the interplay of those particles with forces like electromagnetism. Understanding and mastering those physical laws are essential if we are going to be able to predict how long it's going to take a rocket to reach Saturn, for example, or how long the process of the radioactive decay of uranium will take.

But my hypothesis goes on to assert something far more controversial, which is that the laws and constants of nature have a second important fucntion -- they also simultaneously encode a kind of developmental program. They function like cosmic DNA. There's a hidden subscript to them, which is like a developmental code, a genetic program. It's like a computer program that is programming the emergence of life and intelligence. It suggests that the emergence of life and intelligence is written into the laws and constants of physics at the most fundamental level. That's my version of the strong anthropic principle. Now that's a radical assertion, but it's becoming less so. I think a number of prominant scientists are really starting to contemplate that possibility seriously -- Martin Reese, Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson, Seth Shostak, and others.

The proposition is that the whole ensamble of physical laws and constants is literally a developmental code in precisely the same sense that DNA is. It prescribes the ontogeny of what is really an organism, and it provides a plan or a blueprint for the replication of that organism.

WIE: By organism do you mean the universe itself in some sense? Are you saying that the development of the "organism" in this case is essentially the evolution of the universe?

Gardner: Exactly. And that yields a whole set of mirror images of some of our familair concepts. For instance, under this worldview, terrestial evolution is really more akin to ontogeny, to the process by which a single organism develops. It's more like the process by which an organism grows from a fertilized egg into a fully mature individual of a particular species. And my hypothesis says that the entire universe is a replicator, in which the laws and constants of physics are not randomly reshuffled with each iteration of the Big Bang. In fact, they are controlled. They are patterned. They are structured in the way that DNA structures the birth and development of a new individual of a particular species.
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WIE: And you're suggesting that something is developing in the universe--that something is being born.

Gardner: Yes. The universe is essentially coming to life.

Gardner is essentially proposing that intelligence was a necessary evolutionary step in the development of the universe. He suggests that evolution needs intelligence as a kind of feedback loop in the same way that any developing organism requires more than the simple genetic code of DNA to develop. There has to be a feedback loop in which newly developed tissue and structures activate the next step in the development of the organism. Basic developmental biology.

Gardner is extending this same process into the entire universe. He suggests that the basic laws and constants of physics act like DNA, but that for further evolution to occur, the universe needs it own creations to act as a feedback loop to begin the next stage of evolution. Gardner feels that intelligence -- not only human -- acts as this feedback loop.

Here are a couple of other links to Gardner's writing:
Biography at WIE?
The Physical Constants as Biosignature
Biocosm, The New Scientific Theory of Evolution
Biocosm


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