Familiar ground; Stephenson is wandering near to a lot of material I covered when I was doing my thesis. Since I could talk for days about this stuff, I'll compensate by keeping my notes here extremely short.
The arguments for and against "design" in the universe have recently been picked up by physicists and cosmologers, and Jesry's explanation based on a many-worlds interpretation (see previous note) touches, in a nutshell, some of those arguments, specifically those centered around the anthropic principle.