Darwin’s theory of evolution is our best explanation for life, but it has a well-known weakness: it cannot predict the future. It can only explain how we got here. In contrast, the big theories of physics, Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, make astonishingly accurate predictions, and so have long been regarded as science’s best theories, capturing reality’s deepest truths. Yet some philosophers, biologists, and even physicists argue that evolution may be the lasting winner, uncovering the universe’s ultimate nature. The cosmos, they claim, is not a mechanism governed by fixed laws, but something more like a self-creating, unpredictable organism, whose patterns are best explained by natural selection. Some physicists even argue that the laws of physics are not eternally fixed but rather have evolved through a process spanning multiple universes.

Can evolution dethrone the deterministic theories of Newton and Einstein as our deepest account of reality? Should we see the cosmos as an evolving, unpredictable flux, rather than a predictable, law-governed mechanism? Or is it ultimately governed by timeless laws that science should strive to uncover?

Stephen Hawking collaborator Thomas Hertog, CERN particle physicist Daniel Whiteson, and experimental quantum physicist Ivette Fuentes debate whether the universe evolves.