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by Johnjoe McFadden

Prof. McFadden is the author of the international best seller: Quantum Evolution: How Physic's Weirdest Theory Explains Life's Biggest Mystery
Note: Educators and Librarians: book available at Baker and Taylor: Also available at Amazon.com and Barnes&Noble.com

A concept from Quantum Evolution: What is life? Thermodynamic chaos or an order based on order?

Thermodynamics:

The principle of the stream engine: entropy and millions of particles do work.

From Prof. Mcfadden's book:

"To see how entropy is involved in heat engines, imagine … a piston…. The combined actions of billions of incoherently moving molecules bumping into the piston will force the piston to move to the right. We could harness the kinetic energy of the piston to do some work such as drive a car… Again I must emphasise that a directional force does not cause the directed motion of the piston from the left to the right. Instead, it is driven by the random motion of billions of particles…"

View the illustration of the piston diagram below: Billions of gas particles randomly define work as the piston moves, while unwanted heat is evolved, increasing the entropy of the universe.

From his book: an objection of viewing life in terms of thermodynamics or so-called "chaos theory:"

"[Yet] scientists believe that life is exactly this, an elaborate heat engine. For instance, the chemist P. W. Atkins writes… ‘We are the children of chaos, and the deep structure of change is decay. At root, there is only corruption, and the unstemmable tide of chaos….' "

Order based on Order:

From this Prof. McFadden implies that the origin of life could not have been the result of blind, Darwinian chance processes:

"I am sure I don't need to remind you of all those busily typing monkeys [From Huxley's book that a monkey randomly punching a key board would, in near infinite time, eventually write a Shakespeare Sonnet] to persuade you that an organism with 500 genes, each made up of about 1,000 DNA bases, could not ever have arisen entirely by chance…"

But instead life, at the very core of its being, at the level of the strange behavior of sub-atomic particles, is an order based upon order: A single elementary particle involved in an ordered quantum coding:

You will notice the incorrect base pairing in the diagram below that causes a mutation (mutations should not have the negative connotation of popular thinking: some of them are in fact beneficial and promote life): what we see is the targeted positioning of an electron or proton by a Schrodinger Wave Function that is able to direct the process of mutation simply because of its control over the fate of a single elementary particle!!

Tautomeric forms of DNA bases can pair with the incorrect base: A can pair with G and T can pair with C (rather than A pairing with T and C pairing with G). Watson and Crick proposed that if during DNA replication, either the template DNA base or the incoming base is in the tautomeric form, then the wrong base may be inserted into the new strand, resulting in a mutation.

From this Prof. McFadden implies that genetic messaging is actually a sort of mysterious (perhaps even additive) sine-wave-like quantum coding:

"[The] quantum nature of the genetic code…could be viewed as a linear array of protons…. As I described above, the coding properties of DNA are due to the hydrogen bonding between protons and electrons in the DNA bases: the position of these particles determines which hydrogen bonds can form and thereby the base-pairing that underlies the genetic code. Protons and electrons are fundamental particles and their position is subject to quantum mechanics. The genetic code becomes a quantum code."

And elaborating further on this theme later on in his book:

"Thermodynamics is a science of big numbers. It is about bulk properties of matter and the order it generates is only an average order. At the level of [thermodynamic's] fundamental particles, everything is chaotic. In contrast, life is a phenomenon of small numbers and displays order right down to the level of fundamental particles."

The central claim of "Quantum Evolution" is that life is, at its most fundamental level, a quantum phenomenon.