Could black holes give birth to new universes? This controversial theory is gaining fresh attention

What if the universe is not a one-time event, but part of a much larger cycle of cosmic reproduction?

A fringe idea known as cosmological evolution proposes that universes could reproduce by creating black holes, with each black hole potentially giving birth to a new universe. The idea, first developed by physicist Lee Smolin in the 1990s, has attracted renewed attention after observations from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) revealed surprisingly mature galaxies and massive black holes in the early universe.

The concept sounds more like science fiction than physics. But its supporters argue that the universe itself appears to have become increasingly complex over time, evolving from a hot, nearly uniform state into stars, galaxies, planets and eventually life.


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Irish writer and researcher Julian Gough has become one of the theory's prominent public advocates. Writing on his Substack, The Egg and the Rock, Gough argues that the same evolutionary logic used to explain the development of life could potentially be applied to the universe itself.

“In every sphere, when we discover a self-ordering, self-complexifying system, it turns out it’s had a previous evolutionary history.”

Gough's question is simple but profound: if evolution explains how complexity emerges in so many systems, why should the universe be an exception?

The idea began with black holes

The roots of cosmological evolution go back to physicists Bryce DeWitt and John Wheeler, who explored the possibility that the extreme conditions inside black holes could somehow lead to new expanding regions of spacetime.

Lee Smolin developed that concept into a theory of cosmological natural selection.

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In Smolin's model, black holes could create new universes. If the physical properties of a parent universe were passed to its offspring with small variations, universes that produced more black holes would effectively create more descendants.

Over many generations, this could act somewhat like Darwinian evolution.

Universes would not evolve because they were consciously adapting. Instead, universes with physical laws that favored the formation of more black holes would reproduce more frequently.

Smolin published the idea in his 1992 paper Did the Universe Evolve? and later explored it in his 1997 book The Life of the Cosmos.

For decades, however, the theory remained outside the mainstream of cosmology.

Then the James Webb Space Telescope changed the conversation

Gough became interested in Smolin's work and began asking whether cosmological evolution could produce testable predictions.

His reasoning was that if early universes reproduced through black holes, primitive universes might favor a relatively simple form of reproduction. One possibility would be direct collapse, in which enormous clouds of primordial gas collapse directly into massive black holes.

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Gough predicted that JWST could find evidence of massive black holes appearing extremely early in cosmic history and that these objects could help drive the rapid formation of stars and galaxies.

On July 8, 2022, he published his predictions on Substack, before JWST had begun revealing its deepest observations.

Then came the observations.

JWST found evidence of galaxies existing much earlier than many standard cosmological models had expected. Some appeared surprisingly massive and organized only a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

Astronomers have also identified extremely early massive black holes, including one observed in a galaxy roughly 470 million years after the Big Bang.

These findings have raised difficult questions about how quickly the first galaxies and black holes could have formed.

For Gough, they were at least consistent with the predictions he had made.

Does that mean black holes create universes?

Not at all.

This is where the theory remains highly speculative.

JWST has not detected another universe inside a black hole, nor has it shown that black holes generate new spacetime. The observations do not prove cosmological evolution.

Instead, supporters argue that the unusually rapid appearance of massive structures in the early universe makes the question worth investigating.

Evolutionary systems biologist and philosopher Johannes Jäger has argued that Gough's predictions deserve more serious scientific testing, while biophysicist Michael Levin and cosmologist Stephon Alexander have also expressed interest in exploring the idea.

Alexander has described cosmological evolution as a potentially “beautiful idea,” while stressing that it must ultimately be reconciled with established physics.

The biggest problem: how would a universe inherit its physics?

For Darwinian evolution to work, information has to pass from parent to offspring.

Cosmological evolution therefore faces a major unanswered question: how could a black hole pass the physical laws of one universe into another?

Scientists do not yet have a complete theory of quantum gravity, which would be needed to describe the deepest interior of black holes and the behavior of spacetime under extreme conditions.

There is also another fundamental problem.

Black holes are known to trap matter and light behind an event horizon. How could something collapsing inward eventually produce a new, expanding universe?

Some theoretical models have explored versions of this possibility, but there is currently no established evidence that black holes actually give birth to separate universes.

Could our universe itself be inside a black hole?

Another intriguing possibility has emerged from recent research.

A 2025 study by Lior Shamir examined the rotational directions of spiral galaxies and argued that a possible imbalance could be consistent with the idea that our universe exists inside a rotating black hole.

But that interpretation remains disputed. The observed pattern could have other explanations, including effects related to the rotation of the Milky Way.

In other words, there is currently no scientific consensus that our universe is inside a black hole.

Even standard cosmology has unanswered questions

Cosmological evolution is not the only framework with major mysteries.

The standard cosmological model successfully explains a huge range of observations, but it depends on concepts such as dark matter and dark energy, neither of which has been directly detected in the way ordinary matter has.

That leaves room for researchers to explore alternative ideas.

German cosmologist Jenny Wagner has argued that studying a single universe limits what scientists can learn, comparing the problem to studying medicine using only one patient.

The challenge is finding observations that can distinguish one theory from another.

A strange idea that could become testable

For now, cosmological evolution sits firmly in the realm of speculative theoretical physics.

JWST's discoveries do not demonstrate that universes reproduce. They do, however, show that the early universe may have been capable of producing massive, structured objects much sooner than many researchers expected.

That makes one of the theory's central questions more interesting: could black holes be more than the graveyards of stars? Could they also be cosmic birthplaces?

Answering that would require much more than finding an unexpectedly early galaxy. Scientists would need evidence that black holes can create new expanding spacetime and, ultimately, that physical properties can pass from one universe to another.

Until then, cosmological evolution remains an intriguing hypothesis rather than an established explanation.

But as Gough puts it, if evolutionary processes explain the emergence of complexity across nature, perhaps the universe itself should not automatically be excluded from the question.