  Models of structure formation in the universe postulate that matter
distributions observed today in galaxy catalogs arise, through a complex
non-linear dynamics, by gravitational evolution from a very uniform initial
state. Dark matter plays the central role of providing the primordial density
seeds which will govern the dynamics of structure formation. We critically
examine the role of cosmological dark matter by considering three different and
related issues: Basic statistical properties of theoretical initial density
fields, several elements of the gravitational many-body dynamics and key
correlation features of the observed galaxy distributions are discussed,
stressing some useful analogies with known systems in modern statistical
physics.
