Earth's organisms developed via evolution. What if the cosmos did, too?

Original description

Last year, I wrote a speculative cosmology piece called Blowtorch Theory. It rather cheekily extended the American theoretical physicist Lee Smolin's wonderful, powerful, oddly neglected theory of cosmological natural selection; the idea that universes reproduce, with variation, leading to Darwinian evolution of universes. While I was having dinner with my five-year-old, a friend texted to say that the piece was at number one on Hacker News. At the time, I didn't really know anything about the website, or its readers – but I learned a LOT over the next few hours, as my dinner went cold (and my...