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Wendi Li

Quantum Evolution

How do you define evolution? The orthodox Darwinian method? Intelligent design? Or the novel quantum method through adaptive mutation?
Are you familiar with the peppered moth story? A basic summary is this: peppered moths are speckled white, using camouflage to blend in to their habitat. But then, a coal plant opened nearby and polluted the air with soot, turning the trees black and making the white moths easy targets for predators. However, in only a few generations, the moths changed color—turned coal black—to blend in with the soot-covered trees.
If mutations were random, as the Darwin method suggests, then where were the yellow moths, the purple moths, or the blue moths? How convenient was it that black showed up? It seemed as though the DNA knew that the moths’ environment—the trees—had turned black.
Another question: how did the first life form emerge? The textbook answer and the one everyone’s familiar with is that energy, such as lightning, solar radiation, or volcanic heat combined with the abundant amount of hydrogen, methane, and water in the atmosphere to create simple organic compounds. Then, millennia later, these compounds joined together to form a molecule that could replicate. Since these were still very simple and basic molecules, they probably would have made many errors, or mutations, in replication, and the most successful mutant molecules continued to thrive and to reproduce more molecules, thereby creating a form of Darwinian natural selection. This theory is called the Oparin-Haldane hypothesis.
The first step of this theory has been recreated in the lab by a young researcher named Stanley Miller in 1952. He was able to produce amino acids from a combination of gasses and energy, but no proteins were formed. And to this day, no proteins have been formed. There are many reasons for this but the simplest is that even the simplest replicating protein has thirty-two amino acids. The odds of forming this protein—with the right amino acids in the right order—are incredibly thin. Ten to the power of 41 (1041). The organic carbon in all today’s rainforests add up to ten to the power of 15 (1015) kilograms. If we dissolved a similar amount of amino acids, we still would have no chance of making the protein. In fact, we would need to dissolve five thousand rainforest-sized amounts of amino acids to have some chance of finding one protein. So how did life emerge from a soup of amino acids?
Some scientists explain it through quantum evolution. Many other theories are out, but I find quantum evolution to be the most reasonable. But in order to understand quantum evolution, we first need to be familiar with quantum mechanics.
There are only four main principals of quantum mechanics that need to be understood right now. First principle: quantum mechanics deals with subatomic particles: protons, electrons, and neutrons. In classical physics, these particles can be either a wave or a particle, never both. However, in quantum mechanics, as observed by Max Planck, those same particles can exist as a wave and a particle. Otherwise referred to as wave-particle dualism, they have particle-like properties and wave-like properties, but not both at the same time. In the quantum level, everything exists in a state of potential. These little subatomic critters have the potential to be either a wave or a particle.
Second principle: the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, formulated by the German physicist, Werner Heisenberg. This principle states that the position of any particle is uncertain until observed. The infamous example of this principle is the Schrödinger’s cat paradox. Put a cat into a sealed box that contains a device that may or may not kill the cat. There’s a purely random, 50-50 chance of the cat being dead or alive. If one refers back to the principal, he can conclude that when the box is closed, the cat is potentially both dead and alive. The cat is in a state of quantum superposition of being both dead and alive. It’s only when he opens it that he knows whether the cat is dead or alive.
Third principal: measuring a subatomic particle forces it to be either a wave or a particle. The classic example for this principle is the double-slit experiment, designed by Thomas Young.
Imagine this:



Pretend that these two rectangles are walls and that the two slits are windows. If someone shot bullets at those slits, the pattern on the second wall would look like this:


Pattern A
Now, say that the same person shined a light at the wall with light passing through the two slits. Because light travel as waves, light will hit the slits, then diffract, or bend, to produce a series of interference patterns on the back wall, such as this:




Pattern B
This is the wave diffraction pattern:





When the top and bottom of two waves meet, they cancel each other out, hence the dark bands on Pattern B. The places where two tops meet are the places of highest intensity, hence the white bands. These two, straightforward patterns are what happen in the realm of classical physics. Now we come enter the much more complex world of quantum physics.
Imagine those two walls with those two slits again, but this time, the person doesn’t have a gun or a flashlight, but an electron gun. He shoots the single electrons at those slits, but to his amazement, sees Pattern B, not the expected pattern A. How can that be? Electrons are particles; how can they behave like waves? Aha, but remember that electron has the potential to be both a wave and a particle.
Now the electron gun shooter places a timing device at one of the slits. This device will beep every time an electron passes through that slit. He shoots his electron gun at the slits again. This time, instead of Pattern B appearing, Pattern A appears. In order to explain this phenomenon, one must look back to the third principal. The simple act of measuring makes the electron take a constant form. These experiments have been done many times in laboratory tests, but the results remain the same: Pattern B is seen for the first while Pattern A is witnessed for the second.
Fourth principal: it is our environment that makes these measurements that in turn collapses potential and defines reality. But ask yourself this: If subatomic particles make up atoms, and atoms make up everything around us, why are we not existing in the quantum world? Because the environment is our measuring tool. This measuring tool can be particles bumping against each other, light hitting an object, or substrates and enzymes activating in cells.
Now that we have a grasp on what quantum mechanics is about, let’s finally talk about quantum evolution. What is DNA in its simplest form? Genetic codes that are turned on and off by the movement of electrons and protons. We know from the uncertainty principal that the position of these particles is unsure. Since the proton can be in two places—turning the gene on or off—quantum rule dictates that it is in two places. But only until something measures it and a gene’s measuring tool—its environment—is the DNA molecule. The cell is therefore performing quantum measurement on itself.
But how does quantum measuring contribute to quantum evolution? It’s simple. Consider this example, an experiment developed by John Cairns. In a laboratory, Cairns produced E. coli cells that couldn’t feed on lactose and put them in a lactose-only environment. The normal assumption would be that they would starve and die. Ninety-eight percent did but two percent did not. They were able to mutate a gene that’d allow them to digest lactose. In one generation. And from an array of all of an E. coli’s genes, they mutated the one gene that allowed them to survive. Now let’s put this into quantum perspectives.
The mutation only needed a single proton to be moved, so if the proton could be in two places, it was in two places—in superposition—making the gene mutated and not mutated. Then, since the cell is a quantum-measuring tool, it forced the DNA to choose a side: to mutate or not to mutate. And since the cell is influenced by its environment—lactose-only—it forced the gene to mutate to create lactose-digesting enzymes.
This choosing of which genes to mutate is called adaptive mutation: the environment influences the cell and the DNA chooses which genes to mutate in order to benefit the cell. All this is done through quantum mechanics, hence the name quantum evolution.
Remember our earlier question: how life first started? We can now explain it using quantum evolution. Every particle is in a superposition of states; therefore, it would have been much easier for the thirty-two sequence peptide to form. The quantum computer explains this theory. Normal computers use binary code (bits), the zero or the one, to function. Quantum computers, however, are able to use the zero or the one and the zero and the one. A qubit in a quantum computer could do two tasks simultaneously; two qubits could do four tasks simultaneously, and so on and so forth. If this process of superposition was used on Earth, then unneeded amino acids would have been discarded quickly in order to find the ones that fit the sequence.
Quantum evolution and adaptive mutation work. How else would the moths have known that black was the beneficiary mutation? How else would the E. coli bacteria have known that it needed to mutate a lactose-digesting enzyme? Quantum physics is not an easy topic to understand; even Einstein couldn’t come to terms with all aspects, but neither could he refute any. Not even with his vast knowledge of the sciences.