  The Universe contains everything that exists, including life. And all that
exists, including life, obeys universal physical laws. Do those laws then give
adequate foundations for a complete explanation of biological phenomena? We
discuss whether and how cosmology and physics must be modified to be able to
address certain questions which arise at their intersection with biology. We
show that a universe that contains life, in the form it has on Earth, is in a
certain sense radically non-ergodic, in that the vast majority of possible
organisms will never be realized. We argue from this that complete explanations
in cosmology require a mixture of reductionist and functional explanations.

History and Philosophy of Physics;Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics;General Relativity and Quantum Cosmology