This article was originally published in the Guardian, February 10, 2000; used here with permission.

The Origin of All Life

by Johnjoe McFadden

We are on the brink of a new adventure – quantum biology – that will bring about the synthesis of physical and biological sciences through quantum mechanics.

TV's Castaway gives us that most ancient of battles: man (and woman) against the elements. We watch fascinated as gale force winds rip the roofs from flimsy shelters and expose the stranded city slickers to the same forces that drove the natives to flee the Scottish island several decades ago. What makes the story so fascinating is the frailty of life versus the brutality of the inanimate world. But why is there such contrast? We are after all made of the same materials, driven by the same chemical reactions as the rest of the planet. Why is life so special?

The scholars of the ancient world had an answer: life contained an extra ingredient – a spirit or soul. Modern science has no truck with such mysticism, but given the staggering complexity of living cells, nagging doubts remain. Even the simplest self-replicating organisms – a class of bacteria known as mycoplasmas – contain many hundreds of genes; each made up of more than a thousand different genetic instructions. How did such complexity emerge?

The standard "primordial soup" explanation is that life starts from a rich mix of chemicals sloshing through the early seas. Researchers in the 1950s even managed to make simple building blocks of life – amino acids – by simulating conditions they thought prevailed on the early Earth. But hundreds of primordial soup experiments later, scientists are not significantly closer to the goal of generating a self-replicating organism in the laboratory.

As the Taransay castaways grit their teeth and turn their faces towards the North Atlantic storms, we should bear a thought for the strange world of quantum mechanics. It is this, I believe, that for four billion years has provided living organisms with the will to challenge their environment.

Quantum mechanics is a science so strange that even Einstein could never accept its implications. Yet it is built upon very simple observations. One is known as the "double-slit experiment". If light is shone though a pair of slits then the emerging light will illuminate a series of light and dark bands on a screen. These bands, known as interference patterns, are manifestations of the wave nature of light, and are formed when light waves passing through both slits emerge as two beams that recombine to either reinforce each other (peaks march in step – light bands) or cancel each other out (peaks meet troughs – dark bands).

That light behaves as a wave is perhaps not too surprising. What is far more challenging to understand is how particles manage the same trick. Fire single atoms through the pair of slits and the pattern formed by their collisions with the screen adds up to the same kind of interference patterns as you see with light.

Waves generate interference patterns because they can pass through the two slits simultaneously. But how can a single atom be in two places at once? Nobody knows.

And the world that emerges from the physicists' efforts is not the one we know. Today, one of the most popular interpretations, and one that has the backing of Nobel prize-winning physicists, is that a multiverse exists in which everything that can happen does happen.

Although our conscious self inhabits only one branch of the multiverse – our own universe – fundamental particles inhabit the entire multiverse and it is this property that allows them to be in two places at once. Each place is in its own parallel universe.

But, you may say, the world we see is just not like that. How can atoms be in two places yet bigger objects, though made of atoms, can't?

At least part of the answer seems to be that the quantum mechanical weirdness that allows particles to occupy different states simultaneously is itself wavy. For bulky objects, whose dynamics is an average of billions of particles, the peaks and troughs tend to average to zero, cancelling out the quantum weirdness. This is why the big objects we can see hardly ever show quantum effects.

The form and dynamics of every living organism on this planet is controlled by a single molecule of DNA. Recent experiments suggest that size alone is not a bar to quantum behaviour. A group based in Vienna have recently fired fullerene molecules through the double slit experiment and demonstrated that these particles have no problem in sailing through both slits simultaneously.

And fullerene is big – 60 carbon atoms in a cage-like structure, the famous "buckyball" molecule – with a diameter similar to that of the DNA double helix. If fullerene can enter the quantum multiverse then the microscopic constituents of our own cells, including DNA, are in there as well.

That the genetic code may inhabit the quantum multiverse has startling implications. The driving force of evolution is mutations; it is they that provide the variation that is honed by natural selection into evolutionary paths.

But the motion of fundamental particles, electrons and protons, cause mutations. If these particles can enter quantum states, then DNA may also be able to slip into the quantum multiverse and sample multiple mutational states simultaneously.

From our viewpoint, inhabiting only one universe, the cell that emerges from the multiverse may seem to "choose" advantageous mutations. This is of course heresy for standard Darwinism but ex periments performed a decade ago suggest that under some circumstances, bacteria may be able to "choose" which genes to mutate. Quantum evolution may be the answer.

Quantum evolution may also account for that greatest puzzle of biology – how life began. The astronomer Fred Hoyle described the likelihood of random forces generating life as equivalent to the chances that a tornado sweeping through a junkyard might assemble a Boeing 747.

The world is just not big enough to evolve life if it relied entirely on chance. But if the earliest strivings towards life were not in the conventional universe, but in the quantum multiverse, then these objections do not arise. Any small primordial pond could generate life, if it had access to the quantum multiverse. Life may be the product, not of a single universe, but a host of parallel universes.

So although our bodies inhabit the familiar world dominated by random motion, the microscopic units that drive our cells tread the multiverse. This, I believe, is what gives life its extraordinary dynamics and its ability to resist the randomising forces that assail it. Those same dynamics, though involving electromagnetic fields within our brain rather than DNA, are also, I believe, the source of our free will – but that's another story.

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