I particularly agree with the general thrust of the theory of "Cosmological Natural Selection" which Smolin claims to have invented in the late 1990s. The only trouble is that the theory that black holes rebound as new big bangs with sufficient variability in their initial state for differential reproduction rates to drive an evolutionary mechanism became obvious to me almost as soon as I read Ervin Laszlo's Evolution: The Grand Synthesis in the late 1980s. But I certainly don't claim to have "invented" such a theory, though I am sure I refered to it in passing in papers written in the early 1990s, so I should go digging when I get a chance.

I really should not spend the time right now to discuss the several points that flow from this in any depth, so I expect I will revisit this thread with follow up posts from time to time.