41–50 of 85 posts
>Yet nobody really believes that a cat can be simultaneously dead and alive. Except, of course, all those physicists that do. http://www.hedweb.com/everett/everett.htm#believes
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author is a molecular biologist with several published books and over 100 peer-reviewed articles, so he definitely has a grasp on basic biology. I think that what you are missing is the assertion that each atom plays an individual role in the process. That is, there are low-level processes that take place on a small enough scale to depend on quantum effects that make direct contributions to DNA. The point is that…
The author's 1999 paper proposes a quantum mechanic to explain adaptive mutation. They assert that E. Coli mutates to develop lactase in a lactose enviroment, it does this quickly and seemingly without adverse mutations - randomness fails to explain this. McFadden and Khalili propose that adaptive DNA mutation is a quantum computation. The many possible mutations are explored simultaneously and the quantum state coll…
"The principle that mutations occur randomly with respect to the direction of evolutionary change has been challenged by the phenomenon of adaptive mutations. There is currently no entirely satisfactory theory to account for how a cell can selectively mutate certain genes in response to environmental signals. However, spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum events such as the shift of a single proton (hydrogen atom) from one site to an adjacent one. We consider here the wave function describing the quantum state of the genome as being in a coherent linear superposition of states describing both the shifted and unshifted protons. Quantum coherence will be destroyed by the process of decoherence in which the quantum state of the genome becomes correlated (entangled) with its surroundings. Using a very simple model we estimate the decoherence times for protons within DNA and demonstrate that quantum coherence may be maintained for biological time-scales. Interaction of the coherent genome wave function with environments containing utilisable substrate will induce rapid decoherence and thereby destroy the superposition of mutant and non-mutant states. We show that this accelerated rate of decoherence may significantly increase the rate of production of the mutated state."
I'm no physicist but this smacks of total BS. We know that DNA codes for proteins chemically and no sort of "entangled wave function" is going to spontaneously change an A to a G, split or recombine a DNA molecule along a particular gene boundary, or cause a duplication.
The fact that some cells might generate more mutations in response to environment changes doesn't demand quantum weirdness. Did the authors ever think _maybe_ there is a good old enzyme inside cells that intentionally alters the DNA at particular locations, thereby generating mutations?
WTF...
"The colour of your eyes, the shape of your nose, your intelligence or propensity for disease are encoded at the quantum level." Uh, nope.
The biophysics of DNA mutation repair -- DNA mutations are a major contribution to genetic changes that lead to observable phenotypes -- are ultimately and firmly quantum. It's unclear at this point whether the quantum phenomena such as coherence or tunneling play any role, but the definition of "quantum" is much larger than just those phenomena. My intuition is that quantum tunnelling of electrons probably plays a role in the kinetics of DNA mutation repair, although this is purely speculative.
Further, some very interesting and mostly ignored experiments by Jackie Barton have demonstrated that the DNA backbone can be used to transmit information; the conjugated pi orbitals of the bases form a long-range, possibly coherent electron path(!) but it's not clear that these phenomena are relevant to evolution.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author's 1999 paper proposes a quantum mechanic to explain adaptive mutation. They assert that E. Coli mutates to develop lactase in a lactose enviroment, it does this quickly and seemingly without adverse mutations - randomness fails to explain this. McFadden and Khalili propose that adaptive DNA mutation is a quantum computation. The many possible mutations are explored simultaneously and the quantum state coll…
Reading their abstract makes me cringe. "The principle that mutations occur randomly with respect to the direction of evolutionary change has been challenged by the phenomenon of adaptive mutations. There is currently no entirely satisfactory theory to account for how a cell can selectively mutate certain genes in response to environmental signals. However, spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum events such a…
Also, spontaneous mutations occur, and they're caused by interactions between bases and photons; again, these can only be explained by using quantum molecular orbital theory.
I'm not going to the argue the author of your quoted statement is likely to be correct.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Protein folding is a quantum thing indeed. And folding matters no less than the amino acids sequence.
Folding has nothing to do with DNA.
This is an approximation:
http://mfold.rna.albany.edu/?q=mfold/dna-folding-form
The underlying quantum chemistry (which doesn't need to specifically invoke coherence or tunneling) is required to get truly accurate results. Classical approximations aren't sufficient to measure really subtle energy differences between folded forms.
There is also the quantum mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mind
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The author's 1999 paper proposes a quantum mechanic to explain adaptive mutation. They assert that E. Coli mutates to develop lactase in a lactose enviroment, it does this quickly and seemingly without adverse mutations - randomness fails to explain this. McFadden and Khalili propose that adaptive DNA mutation is a quantum computation. The many possible mutations are explored simultaneously and the quantum state coll…
Reading their abstract makes me cringe. "The principle that mutations occur randomly with respect to the direction of evolutionary change has been challenged by the phenomenon of adaptive mutations. There is currently no entirely satisfactory theory to account for how a cell can selectively mutate certain genes in response to environmental signals. However, spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum events such a…
" As initially proposed by Delbruck et al. (1935) and Schrodinger (1944) and Watson and Crick (1953), spontaneous mutations are initiated by quantum jump events such as tautomeric shifts in single protons of DNA bases."
You reference catalysts and there are some indications this is a quantum tunneling phenomena :
Here is a talk by Professor Nigel Scrutton of the University of Manchester who has many papers on this, Quantum effects in biological catalysis
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnxmHlbtJDI
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Here is Donald's paper criticising McFadden and al-Khalili's ideas http://people.bss.phy.cam.ac.uk/~mjd1014/qevrev.pdf
and their rebuttal : http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0110083v1
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The 2012 Quantum Biology Conference at the IAS has some excellent papers - which are (too briefly) summarised into the OP article. http://www.ias.surrey.ac.uk/workshops/quantumbiology/
It's always a shame when the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics is presented as how reality works. Most of the perceived weirdness of QM comes from the leaps of faith required to make the Copenhagen interpretation work.
To ask somebody what interpretation they prefer is akin to asking a mathematician how they interpret the reality of ZFC they prefer. It's interesting, but ultimately pointless, because it has more to do with our ability to interpret than with the real meaning of the statements. To that end, Copenhagen makes the important point - "Shut up and calculate".