The status of cosmological natural selection

TL;DR

The paper reviews the concept of cosmological natural selection, demonstrating it can produce falsifiable predictions without relying on the anthropic principle, and addresses recent criticisms by analyzing underlying assumptions about quantum gravity.

Contribution

It shows that cosmological natural selection can yield testable predictions within a landscape framework, avoiding the need for anthropic reasoning.

Findings

Cosmological natural selection satisfies conditions for falsifiability.

It remains valid regardless of the ensemble of universes generated by black holes.

Criticism based on quantum gravity assumptions is likely unfounded.

Abstract

The problem of making predictions from theories that have landscapes of possible low energy parameters is reviewed. Conditions for such a theory to yield falsifiable predictions for doable experiments are given. It is shown that the hypothesis of cosmological natural selection satisfies these conditions, thus showing that it is possible to continue to do physics on a landscape without invoking the anthropic principle. In particular, this is true whether or not the ensemble of universes generated by black holes bouncing is a sub-ensemble of a larger ensemble that might be generated by a random process such as eternal inflation. A recent criticism of cosmological natural selection made by Vilenkin in hep-th/0610051 is discussed. It is shown to rely on assumptions about both the infrared and ultraviolet behavior of quantum gravity that are very unlikely to be true.