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shminux comments on Anthropics and a cosmic immune system - Less Wrong
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In what sense do the existing stars and galaxies look in any way designed or organized in structures or in any way differing from straight-line extrapolation from the Big Bang without any invocation of life or selection processes? This is the same question as 'how do cells and proteins look different from rocks?'
Some sort of selection definitely happens. The first stars were huge and simple, with only hygrogen and helium. They seem to be evolving toward high metallicity and medium size. They also compete for the same food source, interstellar dust. I concede that this is reaching somewhat, but probably not nearly as much as liking rocks to cells.
But what sort of selection is this? Evolution requires, roughly, reproduction and inherited variation with selection. I could imagine that we might see something like this in a stellar life cycle where stars go supernova, scatter gas clouds, and new stars form to go supernova and form even more new stars, but as far as I know, this is not anything we see (and wouldn't work with dark matter, anti-life antibodies, or galaxy-scale organisms), inasmuch as stellar creation is shutting down (I've read this in various places, most recently http://lesswrong.com/lw/i2i/link_cosmological_infancy/ ) and I'm not clear what sort of variation could be inherited there either.