WIE: When you want to solve a crime, you look at the obvious suspects. You don't look at that totally bizarre suspect—that one-in-a-billion chance.

Gardner: Right. It's like saying that the crime might have been committed by, you know, marauding aliens or something. Just think about a googolplex of monkeys typing away randomly until one of them by pure chance accidentally composes a set of equations that correspond to the life-friendly standard model of physics. Sure, it could happen, but . . .

This should all be a hint that we're overlooking something fundamental. The evidence should be telling us that there may exist an unknown natural process, perhaps akin in some manner to terrestrial evolution, capable of effecting the emergence and prolongation of physical states of nature (you, me, the terrestrial biosphere) that are, in the abstract, vanishingly improbable.

So my theory is that the physical laws and constants have at least two functions. The first is the commonly accepted function, which is to govern the physical movement of bodies and particles and the interplay of those particles with forces like electromagnetism. Understanding and mastering those physical laws are essential if we are going to be able to predict how long it's going to take a rocket to reach Saturn, for example, or how long the process of the radioactive decay of uranium will take.

But my hypothesis goes on to assert something far more controversial, which is that the laws and constants of nature have a second important function—they also simultaneously encode a kind of developmental program. They function like cosmic DNA. There's a hidden subscript to them, which is a developmental code, a genetic program. It's like a computer program that is programming the emergence of life and intelligence. It suggests that the emergence of life and intelligence is written into the laws and constants of physics at the most fundamental level. That's my version of the strong anthropic principle. Now that's a radical assertion, but it's becoming less so. I think a number of prominent scientists are really starting to contemplate that possibility seriously—Martin Reese, Paul Davies, Freeman Dyson, Seth Shostak, and others.

The proposition is that the whole ensemble of physical laws and constants is literally a developmental code in precisely the same sense that DNA is. It prescribes the ontogeny of what is really an organism, and it provides a plan or a blueprint for the replication of that organism.

WIE: By organism do you mean the universe itself in some sense? Are you saying that the development of the “organism” in this case is essentially the evolution of the universe?

Gardner: Exactly. And that yields a whole set of mirror images of some of our familiar concepts. For instance, under this worldview, terrestrial evolution is really more akin to ontogeny, to the process by which a single organism develops. It's more like the process by which an organism grows from a fertilized egg into a fully mature individual of a particular species. And my hypothesis says that the entire universe is a replicator, in which the laws and constants of physics are not randomly reshuffled with each iteration of the Big Bang. In fact, they are controlled. They are patterned. They are structured in the way that DNA structures the birth and development of a new individual of a particular species.

WIE: Is this scenario analogous to the human sexual reproductive process in which DNA is combined to create a new individual? And are you suggesting that, as that individual, the universe is restructuring and changing its DNA for its future progeny?

Gardner: Exactly.

WIE: And you're suggesting that something is developing in the universe—that something is being born.

Gardner: Yes. The universe is essentially coming to life.

WIE: So what in your mind are the philosophical implications of that? What are the spiritual implications?

Gardner: They are enormous. Let me quote the physicist Paul Davies: “If life follows from primordial soup with causal dependability, the laws of nature encode a hidden subtext, a cosmic imperative, which tells them 'Make life,' and through life its byproducts, mind, knowledge, understanding—it means that the laws of the universe have engineered their own comprehension. This is a breathtaking vision of nature, magnificent and uplifting in its majestic sweep. I hope it is correct. It would be wonderful if it were correct. But if it is”—and this is Paul's key point—“it represents a shift in the scientific worldview as profound as that initiated by Copernicus and Darwin put together.”

This vision of the universe would completely change our conception of the basic nature of nature. Under this vision, the universe is not fundamentally a random collection of dead matter and the emergence of life and intelligence is not some weird accident. On the contrary, this vision says that intelligence is built into the physical laws of nature. It is saying that the emergence of life and intelligence is preprogrammed.

WIE: If evolution leads to intelligence, then what's next in the developmental scheme? After all, we're only saying that intelligence is built into the laws of nature because that's the highest level of complexity that we understand.

Gardner: Right. But that ever-evolving intelligence, defined really as the ability to intentionally manipulate the warp and woof of the cosmos, the increasing ability to achieve mastery over brute matter—that tendency is preprogrammed.

WIE: Then you have this new force of intelligent life that was created by the evolutionary process that can also see the process objectively and can therefore contribute further to the larger scheme of its own development.

Gardner: Right. But that act of contribution is essential. It has to occur in order for the process to move forward. It's just like DNA. DNA doesn't have enough informational content to really constitute an architectural diagram of an organism, even of an organ within the organism. The emergence of the adult organism depends upon a complicated feedback loop, where the DNA starts the process going but then the process itself modulates further expression of the genotype. So what you said is exactly right. It's like when an embryo begins to develop, every step in that development is not specified in advance by the DNA sequence. What happens is that the embryonic development reaches stage one, and then the tissue complex—that is, the embryo—starts sending signals back into the DNA, which modulate further expressions of the gene into new tissue. So it's a feedback loop, and the informational complexity inheres in that feedback process, not simply in the nucleotide sequence. That's truly the extraordinary miracle of it. The process of embryogenesis is exquisitely programmed to actually take account of the state of its own ongoing development and to use the succeeding stages of development as a sort of augmentation to the basic instruction manual, which is the DNA contained in the genome.

WIE: Do you mean that at some level in the development of life, an embryo needs that extra feedback loop in order to complete its own developmental potential?

Gardner: Every developmental biologist and evolutionary theorist would agree with that.

WIE: So are you saying that humans play that same role in the cosmological, universal evolutionary process? Do we in some way represent that feedback loop for the universe itself?

Gardner: That's what I've hypothesized. Because there simply wouldn't be enough informational content in the physical laws and constants alone to lay out an architectural diagram of life and mind.

WIE: Then the universe needs intelligent life; it needs that conscious feedback loop in order to take evolution further. It can't really do it on its own.

Gardner: As one of my readers says, “I think what you are saying is that intelligent life is the reproductive organ of the universe.” And that's precisely right. That's exactly what my hypothesis asserts—that cosmic replication is the essential role of intelligent life.