The Hawking-Hartle method also reminds me of Richard Dawkins’s famed computer simulation of the alleged creative power of natural selection and random mutation. The simulation, described in his book The Blind Watchmaker, allegedly generated an information-rich line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, “Methinks it is like a weasel,” through random changes in a string of text.44 In both cases, the cosmological and the biological, the modeler had a distant goal in mind. Dawkins had a target sequence in mind; Hawking-Hartle and Vilenkin each had a target wave function in mind.
