Comment by bglusman

Wow, wild this is being taken seriously now perhaps, I first encountered the idea in The Life of The Cosmos ~26 years ago[0] and my impression was the author, Lee Smolin, didn't REALLY beleive it, but he came up with it mostly to have some kind of preferable, falsifiable(er?) alternative to string theory, which he disliked even more, and perhaps more as an idea of the kind of theory we need to explore to start making progress... or that's my memory/impression form 26 years ago, I've been meaning to re-read it for a while since. Anyone read more recently/have other impressions?

(the basic idea was fecund universes/cosmological natural selection[1], such that we should expect to find ourselves, if the theory were true, very near to a local maxima of values such that they approximately maximize the number of black holes produced... but most of the book is really taken up with a fascinating look at the history of physics and ideas...)

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Life_of_the_Cosmos [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_natural_selection