Welcome inspired viewers to Science and Spirituality on Supreme Master Television. On this edition we will discuss a fascinating topic - biological creation and evolution with British molecular biochemist Dr. Johnjoe McFadden.

Dr. McFadden has studied human genetic and infectious diseases. Since 2001 he has been teaching molecular genetics at the University of Surrey in England. Over the years he has researched the genetics of a wide range of microbes and has done computer modeling of evolution.

In his international bestselling book, “Quantum Evolution: How Physics’ Weirdest Theory Explains Life's Biggest Mystery,” Dr. McFadden explores the role of quantum mechanics in life, evolution and consciousness.

Modern biology has challenges with explaining the origin of life on Earth. One of the reasons is that it looks at the question purely from a biochemical perspective. Can quantum physics help us find answers? Let’s find out from our guest today.

What is the current view of molecular biology on the origin of life on Earth?

The current view is that life originated here on Earth from a chemical start. In the primordial soup idea, chemicals randomly came together and over maybe millions of years they collected together to form simple chemicals. And one of these chemicals had the extraordinary property of being able to self-replicate.

Okay. But recently there are some discoveries, first that there is water on Mars, and there are some planetary systems which are very similar to ours. Also there was several years ago a discovery that meteors can also contain amino acids or some organics. They are even older than our planetary system. How do you view these discoveries?

I think it helps the idea of the primordial soup, because one of the many problems with the primordial soup idea, is where did the organic molecules come from? Now, organic material does not mean it is from a living system. What it means is it is carbon-based chemicals. But most scientists don’t believe that living organisms came in from space. Although for instance physicist Paul Davies believes that life may originate from Mars, which is perfectly okay.

But if it originated on Mars, you’ve still got the same problems. Where does the primordial soup come from? So although moving it to Mars helps by maybe starting things a little bit earlier, it doesn’t really solve the fundamental problems: How you make a self-replicator. How do you get from a self-replicator to a cell?

There were some trials to reproduce the primordial soup in the laboratory, like for example the Stanley Miller experiment or other experiments. So how far are scientists from synthesizing artificial life in the laboratory to produce something like RNA (Ribonucleic acid) or something that replicates in a similar way as living species?

The best guess for the kind of simple chemicals that might have been the self-replicators are chemicals called RNA molecules.

They are much simpler, so it’s natural that life started from it.

Yes, exactly. So, they may have some simple properties. Now people have tried now for a long time – two decades really – to make RNA molecules that can self-replicate and so far they’ve been unsuccessful. RNA is a difficult molecule to make, and there maybe a self- replicating RNA out there in terms of all the possible RNA molecules that you can make, one of them may be able to self-replicate. It’s probably an astronomical number and there’s just not enough room on this Earth to make that number of molecules.

So, what is your view actually? Could it happen by chance? Is the Universe big enough and old enough in order to make that chance, because there were calculations that it’s not, so you need many universes actually.

Exactly, that’s where quantum mechanics may come to the rescue. Quantum mechanics could provide an explanation for the origin of life. And the reason for that is that if a system is quantum mechanical it kind of lives in the quantum multi-verse, which means that a small number of molecules can explore a vast number of possible structures. So if the origin of life took place in a quantum mechanical state, then you are not limited by the size of this small pond on the early Earth.

In other words the quantum state can realize all omnipresent possibilities at once, while a random “trial and error” path of development for a life replicator would take an enormous amount of time, longer than the age of our Universe.

I think that could be part of the explanation at least for how you overcome this problem of the huge improbability of life.

Life has evolved in various directions. Mainstream modern biology has adopted Charles Darwin’s theory of adaptation by natural selection, which says populations of an organism will naturally produce individuals that are increasingly better adapted to their environment over time, as a fundamental mechanism of evolution.

Once you have self-replication then Darwinian natural selection kicks in. Once you have Darwinian natural selection and a source of variation you will get evolution. So once you have self-replication the problem is solved really. There are still lots of difficult steps. How you go from a self-replicating molecule to a cell enclosed within a membrane and all this kind of stuff.

But they’re nothing compared to the difficulty of making a self-replicator, and that seems to be the key hard problem in biology. How do you generate a self-replicator? And if you ask it today, what is the simplest self-replicator that exists on this planet, then the answer is it’s a bacterial cell. A bacterial cell is extraordinarily complicated; it has maybe 3,000 genes. It has complex structure membranes, proteins and amino acids and sugars and all its cell walls, all of these structures are necessary to self-replicate on this planet today.

Random forces, they’re not good at making complexity. So we need another way of making complexity, and I think quantum mechanics may provide that.

After these short messages, we have more from our engaging interview with Dr. McFadden. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Science and Spirituality on Supreme Master Television. Our guest today, British molecular biochemist Dr. Johnjoe McFadden, realized more than a decade ago that quantum interference can help in understanding the fundamental aspects of life creation. Dr. McFadden now discusses the relation between Darwin’s theory of natural selection and adaptation and the ideas in his book on evolution.

Let’s talk about the evolution. You wrote a book about quantum evolution. How would you compare your quantum evolution with Darwin’s natural selection and adaptation theory?

First of all, it’s an addition to Darwin’s natural selection. Where quantum evolution comes in is in certain situations where Darwinian natural selection doesn’t seem to work.

You take a bacterial cell, in this case E. coli. You grow it in a medium in which it can’t grow, because it can’t make the enzyme required to break down the sugar that’s present in this medium. The sugar say can be glucose. But yet, if you leave the E. coli on the plate for long enough, little colonies appear.

And they appear at quite a high frequency. And that high frequency is hard to explain by Darwinian natural selection. Because if you look at the frequency of this mutation without glucose being present, it’s very low. But when glucose is present, this frequency goes up maybe a thousand-fold.

This is very difficult to explain that the cell somehow can look at its environment and see, “Okay, what I need to do is mutate this gene, and if I mutate this gene, then I will be able to grow and replicate.” Now, how we understand mutation is mutations occur randomly. It doesn’t make any difference whether you’ve got a sugar there that will allow you to grow or not. The mutation should occur at the same rate.

But in this situation, it doesn’t. There is no mechanism in normal cell biology that explains how you can increase a mutation rate by having a particular environment present. There is no way back from the environment to the genome. This is one of the central dogmas of molecular biology that information doesn’t go back to the genome.

It has to occur randomly and nature selects one.

Mutations occur randomly, natural selection provides the direction of evolution. There is no question that is mostly right. Now given that, if you ask a physicist, “How do you understand single molecules?” they won’t say chemistry, they’ll say quantum mechanics. So that points to living cells being controlled by quantum mechanics.

And if you have living cells being controlled by quantum mechanics within a single DNA molecule, then you can have unusual phenomena going on, such as quantum superposition and quantum coherence. And there may live the solution to this problem.

So how do you see the solution to this problem in terms of quantum mechanics? Here you have the warm temperature of the body, so how can coherence be preserved?

It’s still a difficult problem because as you say, normally you wouldn’t expect quantum mechanical effects in hot, wet systems. The chemical properties of a bottle of benzene on the table will depend on that quantum mechanical effect that the three electrons are spread across six carbon atoms. So if you look at individual molecules, they always behave quantum mechanically. So, what we have to do is take that into account when we look at the positions of protons along the DNA code. What that will do is allow protons to be in multiple positions.

The DNA double-helix is held together by what's called the hydrogen bond, which is a bond between a hydrogen ion, a proton.

So you change chemistry by fluctuating this hydrogen ion.

Essentially. The DNA is actually like a scaffold, and the scaffold is holding protons. Those protons determine the DNA code. So the code is written in the position of protons.

Yes.

So positions of protons is quantum mechanical. So protons can be two places at once. This is what we know from quantum mechanics. And what this allows DNA to do, is allows DNA to code for two different codes at once. Now what this will allow the system to do, when we come back to the E.coli, is the DNA can be a superposition – using a quantum mechanical term of different genetic codes.

But the problem is that this non-locality that you are basically invoking, that you have an environment, like this sugar you mentioned, and that it finds some way to coherently interfere with the DNA code, which is deep into the warm body of this bacteria. How do you envision that?

So actually what I'm claiming is that the measurement is made by the possibility that one of the states of the DNA allows replication of the cell. And in a sense then that possibility of the cell replicating performs the measurement on the DNA to allow it to crash out of the quantum coherence superposition and become a classical state, a replicating cell, that now has that mutation.

Please join us next Monday for Part 2 of our interview with Dr. Johnjoe McFadden on Science and Spirituality. Thank you, cherished viewers for your company on our program today. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. May you have a blessed week ahead.