The key implication of Cosmological Natural Selection

"The key implication of Cosmological Natural Selection" is a blog post published on the Substack platform by Julian Gough, at the custom domain theeggandtherock.com, at the specific web address https://theeggandtherock.com/p/the-key-implication-of-cosmological on October 29th 2025. The blog post is the primary publication; this Zenodo PDF snapshot of the Substack post provides a citable archived version.The post argues that, if Lee Smolin's old theory of Cosmological Natural Selection is correct, and universes reproduce through black holes/big bangs, then the original reproductive mechanism for universes can’t have been stellar-collapse black holes, because stars are complex, orderly structures made of complex, orderly matter; and all the complex, orderly systems we know of are the result of evolution. (Just as the evolutionary history of biological life can’t have started with complex, orderly eukaryotic cells, with their sophisticated, interacting organelles.) Looked at through an evolutionary lens, the periodic table itself, with its dozens and dozens of ever more complex elements, clearly must be the result of an evolutionary process. (It is highly suggestive that the elements get more ragged and unstable towards the upper, more complex, and thus more recently evolved, end.) The original ur-matter, in the original ur-universes, however, must have been as simple as it gets. Very pure, very simple matter, with no structure, and building no structure. Small, efficient, stellar collapse black holes, therefore, generated at the end of a star’s rich and complex lifecycle, are – must be – a later evolutionary breakthrough. So, thinking this through from first principles; if our universe is the result of a Darwinian evolutionary process, then every single one of the earlier universes in our direct evolutionary line must have reproduced successfully, by definition. But the only thing that is unavoidably, unsimplifiably required to make a black hole (to reproduce) is for mass/energy to collapse. The original reproductive mechanism, therefore, must have been the direct collapse of extremely primitive and unstructured matter to form small numbers of large, crude, and therefore supermassive black holes. But there are a large number of supermassive black holes in our universe (one at the center of every galaxy we look at closely); and evolution is frugal; she doesn’t bother to come up with a much more complicated way of doing something for which she has already come up with a perfectly good mechanism, unless that innovation leads to far greater reproductive success. This strongly implies that the the supermassive black holes in our own specific universe must, therefore, have formed by that original reproductive mechanism; direct collapse of extremely large amounts of primitive and unstructured matter. Which, in turn, means that the supermassive black holes in our own specific universe must have formed before star and galaxy formation, from the smooth gas of the extremely early universe.This PDF upload to Zenodo is to make an accurate, stable version of the original post available longterm for citation.