What if that situation you were in during sixth grade, where you found your passion in music because your aunt gave you a nice guitar, was changed? Your aunt never gives you a guitar, and in that same year you find your passion for drawing cartoons.
The multiverse theory suggests both happen. You are going along as a sixth grader and in one universe you get a guitar, in the other you do not. In all the Universes you are you, you just take the a different path at the fork in the road.
In a multiverse the Nazi's loose in one, win the war in the other ; the electric car gets adopted as the way we do cars, in the other gasoline cars become the way we do cars.
With each moment being a moment of on/off for whether something happened, this means the multiverse is huge, with each moment spinning off at least two versions....one where the ball was caught and the other where it was dropped.
So hopefully you're comfortably imagining an endlessly branching out Universe of different outcomes.
I offer that that the multiverse theory is a better metaphor for understanding evolution.
In the multiverse metaphor there are forks, as in biological life with mutations. The mutant butterfly with a new color pattern or length for its legs spins off eventually to a new species. Lions, cheetahs, jaguars and house cats all have a common ancestor, just like in multiverse theory an event can have multiple outcomes.
Of course in the case of evolution, we live with and see the multiplicity of mutations living all under the roof of one Universe. In the case of evolution all the different species of feline, canine and primate live on the same planet.
What about the mutations we don't see?
We talk about the amazing diversity of life by pointing to the living things around us. What about the things not in existence?
The diverse living things are not the only Multiverse....they are a small percentage of the Multiverse.
The lives that died young (before able to create offspring), and groups or species that went extinct, are the rest of the Multiverse. They are the negative space of the Multiverse.
All those born with mutations that did not work out in their environment are very much an example of diversity. They are just the end of diversity the environment killed off.
This isn't just the phenomenon of "birth defects". Mutations that gave an animal too much power in their biological niche can go extinct by being too strong. Think of a pack of wolves that have an odd
mutation of longer legs. They outrun all their prey. They are wildly successful and well fed for a season. Then, very soon, all of their prey are hunted to zero. That pack of longer legged and faster wolves dies due to not being fit for their environment. So it is not just birth defect mutants that die, but the overly strong or fast mutant that ruins its food supply by eating it all.
The only mutations that work are those that lead to offspring, and those offspring having offspring.
With all this established, we can easily see the biological Multiverse is constantly generating every form of life there could be, and the pressure of reality prunes much of the diversity from the living.
It is like an airplane factory that randomly generates every physical form of plane...even planes with the most bizarre things like playground swings and stair cases welded to their sides....and the reality of flight blots out of existence the ones unfit. What constitutes unfit? Those not capable of coming back to the airstrip after taking off.
So all those planes the left the ground and never came back occupy the negative space of that Multiverse.
The largest portion of the Multiverse are the bad ideas, the failures, those that didn't make it. The largest portion of the Multiverse died. Died in a way that did not leave offspring, descendants in our present world.
The negative space of the Multiverse is what the Universe
Evolution is not about life, it is about death. It is not about seeking out and aiding good design, but about killing bad design.
Evolution does not seek to make functional eyes, it does not seek to make the glories of the world around us. Evolution is just the negative space of the biological Multiverse. It only kills bad design. We end up with what survives, and call it good.
We as humans want to say a good or intelligent designer created all this good.
This is unfortunate, because the only omnipresent....God....or simply overarching immutable power....is one of subtraction....of death.
The only God that propels this enterprise called Life forward is one that employs death, combined with wildly prolific attempts at creating offspring. Mass birthing, and mass death of those outside of some boundaries, with those boundaries fickle and shifting constantly.
In the Bible Jesus healed the sick, brought back the dead, and never married and had children. The very opposite of the omnipresent dynamic that keeps Life going.
Possibly the only true God is Odin -the God of promiscuous sex and death.
Note, the multiverse analogy I describe is more how science fiction has depicted multiverses.
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