The Evolution of Quantum Evolution

Disclaimer: I'm no expert on this topic. To be honest, putting 'quantum' in front of everything makes everything sounds cool but hard to understand. But it's supposed to actually make sense. And I have never done any scientific research apart from checking how many times my brother goes to the fridge to eat bars of KitKat. But like I said its a cool topic and I like cool topics.

What really is this thingy call quantum?

Firstly, we must understand that once matter is broken down to the tiny tiny thingies called electrons, protons, and neutrons, the classical physics theory begin to make as much sense a student reading 'Further Maths' for the first time. The theories don't just vanish, they are strapped to a Saturn-V rocket and ejected when it comes to these subatomic particles. So Max Planck, a really cool scientist, discovered that electrons, protons, and neutrons act as both particles and waves and that's as opposite as you can get. Particles are considered to have distinct orbits and paths like say a football for example... But waves are more zig-zag, wish-washy kind of stuff. Think really really drunk particles swaying faster than a proverbial tornado. In scientific terms, they are less distinct.



This lead to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, where Heisenberg proudly stated that nothing is certain until it is observed. Take my brother for example. My hypothesis would be that the Kit-Kat pack keeps emptying because of my brother. But it could also have been my mom, my dad, or some other bloke who thinks Halloween is 365 days a year. So to know exactly what happens, I spy from a discrete spot in my room. And lo, it's none other than my brother. So the very act of me observing or measuring made me realise that my brother is the culprit. If I hadn't been observing, I would in Heisenberg's terms be 'uncertain'. Its is what we call wave-particle duality.

In an actual experiment, scientist proved that the quantum realm and the normal realm have totally different versions on the famous double-slit experiment. Suppose huge ass wall has 2 holes with a screen behind it. You take the tennis ball shooter thingy and start shooting at the wall. Sometimes you would see the ball go through the holes and hit the screen. If the screen was marked you would see that the marked spots are roughly the same size as the hole in the wall. Let's call this Pattern A.

Now take a beam of light and shine it at the same wall. After some excessive praying for the light to pass through and interfere you would expect a slight diffraction pattern where you would see bands of light and dark on the screen, not necessarily right behind the holes on the screen. Let's call this Pattern B.

Now take electrons and hopefully fire away at the same wall. Now normally electrons would be considered to behave as a particle so you would hope to see Pattern A. That's where you are wrong kiddo, as electrons end up showing Pattern B. This Pattern B remains regardless of whether you fire a shit-ton of electrons or one after another. Can the electron split and interfere? hmm.
Then after excessive hair-pulling, and a bucket load of stress, you decide to put a detector to see why the electron is making fun of you. And et voila the electron now start showing pattern A. And that becomes your queue to destroy your experiment. 

Thus the very act of measuring and observing an electron made sure that electrons behave properly. So technically speaking our bodies are made out of elements right? These elements are made out of protons, neutrons, and electrons, right? Thus our body's cells could literally be behaving as both waves and particles, right?


What is quantum evolution?

Its a lot like Darwinian evolution. Instead of 'survival of the fittest' it's more on how quantum effects possibly lead to the beneficial mutation of an organism. That is not to say Darwin had a crackpot theory. Darwin kinda states that the environment could lead to a mutation, albeit slowly. But quantum states that an environment and cells will mutate rapidly to survive.  In fact, both Darwinian and Quantum theories could actually be complementary. A quantum mutation might lead to an organism rapidly evolving to its surroundings and the Darwinian theory could prove that since that organism is the fittest it will survive. 

Take for e.g. When your taxi and your entire family loves a particular singer, but you absolutely abhor his/her songs, your ears could do some quantum Kung fu and automatically mutate to make sure that whenever you hear the song you automatically tune out. That is quantum evolution. And sooner or later when I lead an uprising against that particular singer you would survive. Survival of the fittest...thats Darwinian theory. Of course, I might be wrong. Uprisings are pretty expensive.

As stated previously Darwin's theory is a very slow mutative evolutionary process as it is based on one singular idea: Randomness. So our cells, over a long time, randomly mutate and see which combination ends up producing the fittest organism. Makes sense doesn't it. After all, we had more than millions of years to evolve. I mean imagine if you tried for the lottery every day for more than a million years. There is a chance you could end up winning. Of course, you would be bankrupt, but that's another story. 

But it's not like we could have produced so many different mutations for millions of organisms by pure chance right? Take for example the Cambrian period. The Cambrian marked a profound change in life on Earth; prior to the Cambrian, the majority of living organisms, on the whole, were small, unicellular and simple. The Cambrian Period encompassed a relatively short period of twenty or so million years. Short in the sense of Earth life years. But during that time a vast explosion of new life appeared: sponges, snails, jellyfish, and other organisms diversified from the unicellular soup, which began to vastly resemble today's organisms. And to be honest there is no concrete evidence for how it happened.

To talk more about randomness, let's talk about the primordial soup. We know our Earth's early atmosphere was full of hydrogen, methane, and water. Energy from say a lightning strike could help provide enough activation energy for these gases to form simple organic compounds. These were then pressure cooked in the primordial soup and eventually formed a molecule that could replicate. Something like an amino acid. But we have only formed amino acids. How would these form our life-giving proteins? Around 30+ amino acids need to be formed in the right order to have a replicating protein. The probability is 10 to the power 41. About the same chance you have of getting out of the proverbial "friend-zone". Not good odds.

I might be very very wrong but maybe this was quantum evolution.

 Like aforementioned ,sub-atomic particles have a quantum potential. All the smallest sub-units of our universe are basically classified as waves of energy. This could apply to a biological organism as this could actually mean that that our particles of DNA could actually collaborate in different dimensions producing different organisms. So this quantum state of potential of the sub atomic particles need a measurement to collapse this quantum potential. And that measuring tool could actually be you and your environment.

Our DNA is basically genes and these genes are basically chemicals. Now in a situation say when an organism is 'blablabla' intolerant. That organism is then put in a 'blablabla' solution. Normally speaking majority of it should die, some lucky boys might evolve after like a bajillion years and it would end up being able to consume 'blablabla' and remain healthy. The organisms genes would be off for now but on later. Like binary digits 0 or 1. But in the quantum realm it could be in both states 0 and 1 (together). So the genes which are mutating can be both helpful and useless at the same time. Off and on at the same time. However since its body, the environment is like a measuring tool the gene collapses taking up either the off or on place.Thus its body quantumly evolved into a 1 or a 0. So most of them might collapse to a 0 but some might collapse to a 1. Thus surviving.

After this is where daddy Darwin comes in. By his 'survival of the fittest' the environment will make sure the 1 is going to last longer. And et voila. A newly mutated longer-lasting organism. It is not exactly random is it. 


I know its hard to understand. Some of it doesn't make sense at times, even to me. But I find this topic to be vivaciously interesting. I had only heard about Darwin's theories but quantum theory opens up whole worlds of properties. Which is why it could be the key to unlocking the potential of human identity. Take the proverbial 'Great Leap Forward' where there was a massive explosion in human intelligence. Maybe that was all quantum evolution. To be honest anything quantum is severely interesting. Maybe in the next few years it could hep us solve questions like: 'How did we come here?' 'Who are we really?' , etc.