The only way I can imagine it being that synchronized is if evolution itself is somehow tightly coupled to cosmic inflation.<p>Here&#x27;s the speculation in more detail:<p>Evolution can be viewed as an information transfer mechanism that learns about the universe and transfers that information into the genome. (This is one interpretation found in evolutionary information theory.) As the universe inflates there is more total information in it, and therefore more information for evolution to learn. At certain points, a kind of information density &quot;critical mass&quot; is reached and phase transitions occur: the emergence of life, complex life, cooperative&#x2F;multicellular life, higher order intelligence, industrialization and complex society, etc. Since the total amount of information in the universe is (we&#x27;re speculating) tied directly to the arrow of time, this occurs simultaneously everywhere at approximately the same time.<p>Again this is hypothesis bordering on speculation since we do not know of any mechanism that directly couples information content to cosmic inflation like this, or even how we would go about measuring such a thing objectively. For instance it&#x27;s not possible to differentiate between random and encrypted data using Shannon information measures, so what statistic would you use?