The nature of the natural laws

Although both the existence and the nature of physical laws usually are taken for granted, it is worth examining these ideas’ origin, since it can influence even the approach of today’s science.
Aristotle developed a rather complicated idea about the causes (ending with a kind of “Formal Cause” – which “causes” the form). His “Final Cause” became the modern laws of nature and his “Efficient Cause” is close to modern cause (Barrow: World within World, p. 53). So following Aristotle’s logic we make a distinction between the laws and those phenomena they affect. But it is not surely a necessary distinction between causes and their subjects. The fundamental question is whether the laws exist in a certain sense or they are only practical descriptions of reality. According to Lee Smolin, supposing a kind of cosmic evolution and the existence of baby universes that are born with slightly modified natural laws than of their parent universe's, this “evolving laws seems to be a breakdown of the distinction between the state of a system and the law that evolves it.”
This hypothesis makes possible to imagine some different scenarios between the laws and those subjects that are affected by them.
1. Obviously, we can accept the traditional laws vs systems differentiation.
2. But it is more exciting to suppose that the formation of a baby universe means the formation (slightly) different laws. It can be happened three different ways.

• The first one means that the law formation is restricted to the moment of creation (whatever it means). After the Big Bang we have a certain amount of matter, energy etc. and it won’t change. Similarly, the laws are “finished” as well and they won’t change. On the other hand, Smolin supposes that different universes can be determined by different laws.
• But why to restrict the changes of natural laws for a very short period of time? A second solution proposes a longer, even continuous evolutionary process where the forming laws and the physical environment are in continuous interaction in the course of the universe’s history. According to this model, not only the initial laws of a new universe are different from its parent’s laws, but the changes can be influenced by some events in the history of the universe and slightly different initial conditions would result very different laws later.
• To make the story even stranger, there is the problem of the saltation hypothesis. In evolutionary theory not accepted to suppose that biological evolution produces its effects via large and sudden changes, but cosmology isn’t about earthly ecosystems’ biology. The laws of our Universe seems to be fixed today, but it is imaginable that this idle period when our physical laws are static is only a transitional state, and then a sudden saltation would happen in the future and the nature of the laws will radically change.