John O. Campbell was a Canadian scientist and independent researcher who in 2009 extended Richard Dawkins's concept of Universal Darwinism to include the origin of the universe. Dawkin's famous "memes" evolve by a trial-and-error process that social psychologist Donald T. Campbell in 1960 called "Blind Variation and Selective Retention."

John O. Campbell was a founder of the Evo Devo Community, whose mission is based on his Universal Evolution and astrophysicist Lee Smolin's similar theory of cosmological natural selection.

In 2009. Campbell published his first peer-reviewed journal article, Bayesian Methods and Universal Darwinism.

Bayesian methods since the time of Laplace have been understood by their practitioners as closely aligned to the scientific method. Indeed a recent champion of Bayesian methods, E. T. Jaynes, titled his textbook on the subject Probability Theory: the Logic of Science. Many philosophers of science including Karl Popper and Donald Campbell have interpreted the evolution of Science as a Darwinian process consisting of a 'copy with selective retention' algorithm abstracted from Darwin's theory of Natural Selection. Arguments are presented for an isomorphism between Bayesian Methods and Darwinian processes. Universal Darwinism, as the term has been developed by Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett and Susan Blackmore, is the collection of scientific theories which explain the creation and evolution of their subject matter as due to the operation of Darwinian processes. These subject matters span the fields of atomic physics, chemistry, biology and the social sciences. The principle of Maximum Entropy states that systems will evolve to states of highest entropy subject to the constraints of scientific law. This principle may be inverted to provide illumination as to the nature of scientific law. Our best cosmological theories suggest the universe contained much less complexity during the period shortly after the Big Bang than it does at present. The scientific subject matter of atomic physics, chemistry, biology and the social sciences has been created since that time. An explanation is proposed for the existence of this subject matter as due to the evolution of constraints in the form of adaptations imposed on Maximum Entropy. It is argued these adaptations were discovered and instantiated through the operations of a succession of Darwinian processes.

Bayesian Methods, pp. 3-5

In 2010, Campbell extended Richard Dawkins' "Universal Darwinism" to the evolution of the universe, based on Donald Campbell's Blind Variation and Natural Selection and Wojciech Zurek’s 2009 theory of Quantum Darwinism. He wrote...

The Darwinian nature of Wojciech Zurek’s theory of Quantum Darwinism is evaluated against the criteria of a Darwinian process as understood within Universal Darwinism. The characteristics of a Darwinian process are developed including the consequences of accumulated adaptations resulting in adaptive systems operating in accordance with Friston’s free energy principle and employing environmental simulations. Quantum theory, as developed in Zurek’s research program and encapsulated by his theory of Quantum Darwinism is discussed from the view that Zurek’s derivation of the measurement axioms implies that the evolution of a quantum system entangled with environmental entities is determined solely by the nature of the entangled system. There need be no further logical foundation. Quantum Darwinism is found to conform to the Darwinian paradigm in unexpected detail and is thus may be considered a theory within the framework of Universal Darwinism. With the inclusion of Quantum Darwinism within Universal Darwinism and the explanatory power of Darwinian processes extended beyond biology and the social sciences to include the creation and evolution of scientific subject matter within particle physics, atomic physics and chemistry, it is suggested that Universal Darwinism may be considered a candidate ‘Theory of Everything’ as anticipated by David Deutsch.

Quantum Darwinism as a Darwinian process. (2010) arXiv preprint arXiv:1001.0745., pp. 3-5

In his 2011 book Universal Darwinism: The Path of Knowledge, Campbell wrote...

The Universal Darwinism meta-theory contains the numerous scientific theories which employ a Darwinian process to explain the creation and evolution of their subject matter as well as an exposition of the general principles these theories have in common. The ‘universal’ aspect of this theory is justified by the broad scope of subject matter included under its umbrella. The literature contains numerous scientific theories in quantum physics, atomic and molecular physics, cosmology, biology and culture.

This book will make the argument that Universal Darwinism provides a further advance in the unification of scientific understanding; that Universal Darwinism is a means of consolidating a wide swath of seemingly disparate scientific subject matter within a single theoretical paradigm. The forces and interactions of the micro-world are viewed by modern particle physics in terms of information. John Archibald Wheeler, one of the past century’s most influential physicists, liked to say that his career had moved through three phases, from “Everything is particles” to “Everything is fields” to “Everything is information”. The concept of information not only has a central explanatory role within particle physics it is also central to explanations of emergent levels of complex reality such as biology and culture. The increased focus of scientific explanation on information holds promise for a single theory with the ability to unite many branches of science within the same theoretical framework. For the past 60 years a single theory that is able to explain all fundamental interaction in terms of information has been physic’s Holy Grail and is often referred to as the Theory of Everything (TOE). The presumptuous title is due to the hope that given a single theory of the building blocks we would be able to explain all the more complex emergent systems, such as chemistry and life, which arise from them.

Universal Darwinism, pp. 3-5

John Archibald Wheeler did see everything emerging from information with his famous slogan "it from bit."

But Campbell's main source for the idea that the physical world is evolving by natural selection was not Wheeler. It was Lee Smolin's 1997 book Life of the Cosmos.

In his 2015 book, Darwin Does Physics, Campbell wrote...

This brief, marvellous outline provided by science, by which we can understand ourselves and our current reality as the result of knowledge accumulated since the beginning of time, also has remarkable depth. Both the biological and social sciences may be seen within this general context. In these disciplines, evolutionary accumulation of knowledge is accomplished through the operation of Darwinian processes, and the scientific literature is replete with theories which utilize Darwinian processes to explain the creation and evolution of their subject matter. However the biological and social sciences are unfortunately limited, as they seek to explain phenomena which have evolved only on our planet and only within the past three and a half billion years. We may judge that this paradigm fails to have universal scope.

What about the vast scope of phenomena studied by the physical sciences which encompasses all matter, space and time? I am happy to report that at the basis of the physical sciences there are also recent theories which utilize Darwinian processes to explain the evolution of most of these phenomena.

With the union of the social, biological and physical sciences within this single paradigm, an extraordinary scientific vision is developing. It is simple to comprehend as a whole, yet accesses the full depth of scientific details. It explains reality as an information processor that accumulates knowledge, knowledge that is used to transform the past, since the beginning of time, into the present.

Darwin Does Physics, pp. 3-4

Campbell cites Daniel Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea

The American philosopher of science Daniel Dennett famously wrote: …

If I could give  a prize to the single best idea anybody ever had, I’d give it to Darwin—ahead of Newton, ahead of Einstein, ahead of everybody else.  Why?  Because Darwin’s idea put together the two biggest worlds, the world of mechanism and material, and physical causes on the one hand (the lifeless world of matter) and the world of meaning, and purpose, and goals.  And …he showed how meaning and purposes could arise out of physical law, out of the workings of ultimately inanimate nature. And that’s just a stunning unification and opens up a tremendous vista for all inquiries, not just for biology, but for the relationship between the second law of thermodynamics and the existence of poetry.

Darwin Does Physics, p. 12

But Dennett does not say that inanimate nature itself includes purpose, simply that biology arises out of physical law, but Dennett does see a relation between poetry and the second law.

In his 2016 article, Universal Darwinism As a Process of Bayesian Inference, Campbell wrote...

Many of the mathematical frameworks describing natural selection are equivalent to Bayes' Theorem, also known as Bayesian updating. By definition, a process of Bayesian Inference is one which involves a Bayesian update, so we may conclude that these frameworks describe natural selection as a process of Bayesian inference. Thus, natural selection serves as a counter example to a widely-held interpretation that restricts Bayesian Inference to human mental processes (including the endeavors of statisticians). As Bayesian inference can always be cast in terms of (variational) free energy minimization, natural selection can be viewed as comprising two components: a generative model of an experiment" in the external wood environment, and the results of that "experiment" or the "surprise" entailed by predicted and actual outcomes of the "experiment." Minimization of free energy impfies that the implicit measure of •surprise" experienced serves to update the generative model in a Bayesian manner. This description closely accords with the mechanisms of generafized Darwinian process proposed both by Dawkins, in terms of replicators and vehicles, and Campbell, in terms of inferential systems. Bayesian inference is an algorithm for the accumulation of evldenoe-based knowledge. This algorithm is now seen to operate over a wide range of evolutionary processes, including natural selection, the evolution of mental models and cultural evolutionary processes, notably including science itself. The vanational principle of free energy minimization may thus serve as a unifying mathematical framework for universal Darwinism, the study of evolutionary processes operating throughout nature.

"Universal Darwinism as a process of Bayesian inference." Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience, 10, 49.

In Campbell's 2017 book Einstein's Enlightenment, he hopes to found a new cosmic religion, writing...

This book proposes a cosmic religion that is in harmony with science. It is an audacious project that should raise a red flag with any skeptical reader. To mitigate this skepticism I widely cite scientific literature. I believe the views presented here are well supported by the evidence and by our current state of scientific understanding.

I do not take credit for originating this revelation. Rather, it is boldly proclaimed in the writings of Albert Einstein (1879 – 1955), perhaps the greatest scientific genius who has ever lived. This book is an attempt to develop the vision that he so clearly stated.

It is baffling that almost no one has seemed willing to take Einstein’s spiritual vision of science seriously. He understood that science is our best guide to understanding nature and further that nature is equivalent to God.  Thus, science may provide us with a glimpse into the mind of God.

Even inspirational contemporary scientists, such as Carl Sagan (1934-1996), failed to grasp Einstein’s message. A short quote from Einstein’s writing indicates the depth of his spiritual vision (1):

The individual feels the futility of human desires and aims at the sublimity and marvelous order which reveal themselves both in nature and in the world of thought. Individual existence impresses him as a sort of prison and he wants to experience the universe as a single significant whole.

Clearly Einstein’s vision of science is deeply spiritual. He sees it as a means of liberation from our individual, mortal selves and of uniting ourselves instead with the timeless wonder of the cosmos. Although his God is nature itself and not an anthropomorphic God, created in our own image, he views God and nature as manifesting a ‘marvelous order’ that reveal characteristics of mind as well as materialism.

A second quote may serve to further illuminate his spiritual view (2):

The most beautiful thing we can experience is the Mysterious — the knowledge of the existence of something unfathomable to us, the manifestation of the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty… I am satisfied with the mystery of life's eternity and with the awareness of — and glimpse into — the marvelous construction of the existing world together with the steadfast determination to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature. This is the basics of cosmic religiosity, and it appears to me that the most important function of art and science is to awaken this feeling among the receptive and keep it alive.

God or nature, as understood by science manifests ‘the most profound reason coupled with the most brilliant beauty’. Although we may only glimpse this eternal realm, Einstein strove to comprehend it as fully as possible and claimed that this is the very purpose of science.

Sagan, in describing Einstein’s revelation characterizes it as merely a belief in a few cold, abstract laws of nature.

...a quite different vision of God, one proposed by Baruch Spinoza and by Albert Einstein…  But by God they meant something not very different from the sum total of the physical laws of the universe; that is gravitation plus quantum mechanics plus grand unified field theories plus a few other things equaled God.

In pursuing my goal some new areas of science, developed since Einstein’s passing, appear to hold promise in making his vision more explicit. These include information theory, Bayesian inference and universal Darwinism. Over the years, I have attempted to unite these three bodies of scientific understanding into the candidate version of Einstein’s Enlightenment presented here.

Einstein's Enlightenment, pp.1-2

Campbell's 2019 paper, with British neuroscientist and active inference theorist Karl Friston marked the beginning of a collaboration between Campbell and Friston.

Campbell's 2021 book, The Knowing Universe further builds on the work of Friston and his Free Energy Principle.

A largely unheralded scientific revolution is sweeping through the research community. One aspect of this revolution is a growing body of research centred on Karl Friston's notions of the Bayesian Brain and the Free Energy Principle and based on this work, Friston is rated the most influential neuroscientist of our day. His research reveals that the computation of Bayesian inferences, or the solving of mathematical relationships between hypotheses and evidence, is the brain's main problem-solving mechanism. As documented in the flood of research papers currently published at a rate of over one thousand a year referring to the free energy principle, it appears the brain uses Bayesian inference over and over again to solve the many puzzles confronting it.

The Knowing Universe, p.13

In the The Knowing Universe, Campbell gives us the early history of the development of Universal Darwinism as applied to the evolution go the universe.

I've always had a passion for Universal scientific ideas, applying to almost everything, providing a cosmic perspective...as a college student during the early 1970s, I immersed myself in Darwin's theory of natural selection, and its powerful and elegant logic still forms the basis of my scientific worldview. It is a wonderous theory of how all living things have come to exist, a scientific understanding that tells a compelling story. And I soon became convinced that this theory could generalize into a theory of everything.  For a while, my college career consisted of rewriting the same essay, interpreting various subject matters through the same lens to confirm, at least to myself, the universal explanatory potential of Darwinian theory.   Disappointingly, my idiosyncratic musings found little explicit support in the scientific literature; at the time, there weren't any well-developed Darwinian theories outside of biology. But all that was about to change. Richard Dawkins coined the term universal Darwinism in a 1976 paper, where he used it to argue that any extra-terrestrial life must evolve through natural selection (1). Unfortunately, this paper did not envision Darwinian processes operating beyond biology either on or off planet earth. But his groundbreaking book of the same year, The Selfish Gene, now rated as the most influential science book of all time (2), contained the speculation that cultural evolution might be a Darwinian process. It might employ a new replicator he named a meme - similar to genes in biological evolution. This speculation ignited the school of universal Darwinism, perhaps best described in Susan Blackmore's 1999 book The Meme Machine. But the 1990s extended Darwinian concepts beyond biology to many other fields in addition to culture. The prominent physicist, Lee Smolin, published a 1992 paper, "Does the Universe Evolve," in which he proposed a theory of evolutionary universes he calls cosmological natural selection. In 1995 Daniel Dennett's book, Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pointed to Dawkins' and Smolin's work and outlined Darwinian evolution as a universal evolutionary force.

The Knowing Universe, pp.5

Daniel Dennett did describe Lee Smolin's work, starting with much earlier suggestions. And Dennett is clearly the major source for John O. Campbell's Universal Evolution.

Might it be that there has been some sort of differential reproduction of universes, with some varieties having more “offspring” than others? Hume’s Philo toyed with this idea, as we saw in chapter 1:

And what surprise must we entertain, when we find him a stupid mechanic, who imitated others, and copied an art, which, through a long succession of ages, after multiplied trials, mistakes, corrections, deliberations, and controversies, had been gradually improving? Many worlds might have been botched and bungled, throughout an eternity, ere this system was struck out: Much labour lost: Many fruitless trials made: And a slow, but continued improvement carried on during infinite ages of world-making. [Pt. V.]

Hume imputes the “continued improvement” to the minimal selective bias of a “stupid mechanic,” but we can replace the stupid mechanic with something even stupider without dissipating the lifting power: a purely algorithmic Darwinian process of world-trying. Though Hume obviously didn’t think this was anything but an amusing philosophical fantasy, the idea has recently been developed in some detail by the physicist Lee Smolin (1992). The basic idea is that the singularities known as black holes are in effect the birthplaces of offspring universes, in which the fundamental physical constants would differ slightly, in random ways, from the physical constants in the parent universe. So, according to Smolin’s hypothesis, we have both differential reproduction and mutation, the two essential features of any Darwinian selection algorithm. Those universes that just happened to have physical constants that encouraged the development of black holes would ipso facto have more offspring, which would have more offspring, and so forth—that’s the selection step. Note that there is no grim reaper of universes in this scenario; they all live and “die” in due course, but some merely have more offspring. According to this idea, then, it is no mere interesting coincidence that we live in a universe in which there are black holes, nor is it an absolute logical necessity. It is, rather, the sort of conditional near-necessity you find in any evolutionary account. The link, Smolin claims, is carbon, which plays a role both in the collapse of gaseous clouds (or in other words, the birth of stars, a precursor to the birth of black holes) and, of course, in our molecular engineering.

Is the theory testable? Smolin offers some predictions that would, if disconfirmed, pretty well eliminate his idea: it should be the case that all the “near” variations in physical constants from the values we enjoy should yield universes in which black holes are less probable or less frequent than in our own. In short, he thinks our universe should manifest at least a local, if not global, optimum in the black-hole-making competition. The trouble is that there are too few constraints, so far as I can see, on what should count as a “near” variation and why, but perhaps further elaboration on the theory will clarify this. Needless to say, it is hard to know what to make of this idea yet, but whatever the eventual verdict of scientists, the idea already serves to secure a philosophical point. Freeman Dyson and Fred Hoyle, among many others, think they see a wonderful pattern in the laws of physics; if they or anyone else were to make the tactical mistake of asking the rhetorical question “What else but God could possibly explain it?” Smolin would have a nicely deflating reply. (I advise my philosophy students to develop hypersensitivity for rhetorical questions in philosophy. They paper over whatever cracks there are in the arguments.)

But suppose, for the sake of argument, that Smolin’s speculations are all flawed; suppose selection of universes doesn’t work after all. There is a weaker, semi-Darwinian speculation that also answers the rhetorical question handily. Hume toyed with this weaker idea, too, as we already noted, in part VIII of his Dialogues:

Instead of supposing matter infinite, as Epicurus did, let us suppose it finite. A finite number of particles is only susceptible of finite transpositions: And it must happen, in an eternal duration, that every possible order or position must be tried an infinite number of times. . . .

Suppose . . . that matter were thrown into any position, by a blind, unguided force; it is evident that this first position must in all probability be the most confused and most disorderly imaginable, without any resemblance to those works of human contrivance, which, along with a symmetry of parts, discover an adjustment of means to ends and a tendency to self-preservation. . . . Suppose, that the actuating force, whatever it be, still continues in matter. . . . Thus the universe goes on for many ages in a continued succession of chaos and disorder. But is it not possible that it may settle at last . . . ? May we not hope for such a position, or rather be assured of it, from the eternal revolutions of unguided matter, and may not this account for all the appearing wisdom and contrivance which is in the universe?

This idea exploits no version of selection at all, but simply draws attention to the fact that we have eternity to play with. There is no five-billion-year deadline in this instance, the way there is for the evolution of life on Earth. As we saw in our consideration of the Libraries of Babel and Mendel, we need reproduction and selection if we are to traverse Vast spaces in non-Vast amounts of time, but when time is no longer a limiting consideration, selection is no longer a requirement. In the course of eternity, you can go everywhere in the Library of Babel or the Library of Mendel—or the Library of Einstein (all possible values of all the constants of physics)—as long as you keep moving. (Hume imagines an “actuating force” to keep the shuffling going, and this reminds us of Locke’s argument about matter without motion, but it does not suppose that the actuating force has any intelligence at all.) In fact, if you shuffle through all the possibilities for eternity, you will pass through each possible place in these Vast (but finite) spaces not just once but an infinity of times!

Several versions of this speculation have been seriously considered by physicists and cosmologists in recent years. John Archibald Wheeler (1974), for instance, has proposed that the universe oscillates back and forth for eternity: a Big Bang is followed by expansion, which is followed by contraction into a Big Crunch, which is followed by another Big Bang, and so forth forever, with random variations in the constants and other crucial parameters occurring in each oscillation. Each possible setting is tried an infinity of times, and so every variation on every theme, both those that “make sense” and those that are absurd, spins itself out, not once but an infinity of times.

It is hard to believe that this idea is empirically testable in any meaningful way, but we should reserve judgment. Variations or elaborations on the theme just might have implications that could be confirmed or disconfirmed. In the meantime, it is worth noting that this family of hypotheses does have the virtue of extending the principles of explanation that work so well in testable domains all the way out. Consistency and simplicity are in its favor. And that, once again, is certainly enough to blunt the appeal of the traditional alternative.

Anybody who won a coin-tossing tournament would be tempted to think he was blessed with magical powers, especially if he had no direct knowledge of the other players. Suppose you were to create a ten-round coin tossing tournament without letting each of the 1,024 “contestants” realize he was entered in a tournament. You say to each one as you recruit him: “Congratulations, my friend. I am Mephistopheles, and I am going to bestow great powers on you. With me at your side, you are going to win ten consecutive coin-tosses without a loss!” You then arrange for your dupes to meet, pairwise, until you have a final winner. (You never let the contestants discuss your relation to them, and you kiss off the 1,023 losers along the way with some sotto voce gibe to the effect that they were pretty gullible to believe your claim about being Mephistopheles!) The winner—and there must be one—will certainly have been given evidence of being a Chosen One, but if he falls for it, this is simply an illusion of what we might call retrospective myopia. The winner doesn’t see that the situation was structured so that somebody simply had to be the lucky one—and he just happened to be it.

Now if the universe were structured in such a way that an infinity of different “laws of physics” got tried out in the fullness of time, we would be succumbing to the same temptation were we to draw any conclusions about the laws of nature being prepared especially for us. This is not an argument for the conclusion that the universe is, or must be, so structured, but just for the more modest conclusion that no feature of the observable “laws of nature” could be invulnerable to this alternative, deflationary interpretation.

Once these ever more speculative, ever more attenuated Darwinian hypotheses are formulated, they serve—in classic Darwinian fashion—to diminish by small steps the explanatory task facing us. All that is left over in need of explanation at this point is a certain perceived elegance or wonderfulness in the observed laws of physics. If you doubt that the hypothesis of an infinity of variant universes could actually explain this elegance, you should reflect that this has at least as much claim to being a non-questionbegging explanation as any traditional alternative; by the time God has been depersonalized to the point of being some abstract and timeless principle of beauty or goodness, it is hard to see how the existence of God could explain anything. What would be asserted by the “explanation” that was not already given in the description of the wonderful phenomenon to be explained?

Darwin began his attack on the Cosmic Pyramid in the middle: Give me Order, and time, and I will explain Design. We have now seen how the downward path of universal acid flows: if we give his successors Chaos (in the old-fashioned sense of pure meaningless randomness), and eternity, they will explain Order—the very Order needed to account for the Design. Does utter Chaos in turn need an explanation? What is there left to explain? Some people think there is still one leftover “why” question: Why is there something rather than nothing? Opinions differ on whether the question makes any intelligible demand at all. If it does, the answer “Because God exists” is probably as good an answer as any, but look at its competition: “Why not?”

Darwin's Dangerous Idea, pp.177-179

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