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.

Welcome to Science and Spirituality on Supreme Master Television. Today we will continue our lively discussion with British molecular biochemist Dr. Johnjoe McFadden regarding his genetic perspective on biological development.

Dr. McFadden studies 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.

Last week, we discussed the E. coli bacteria, which have a peculiar preference to mutations that can feed themselves with glucose if it is available in their environment. The behavior of the E. coli contradicts Darwin’s theory of evolution, which assumes random mutations with regards to natural selection or the idea that organisms naturally produce individuals that are increasingly better adapted to their environment over time.

Dr. McFadden hypothesized this behavior could result from quantum measurement that the environment performs on DNA chromosomes responsible for encoding bacteria mutations.

We asked Dr. McFadden if this non-local, or distant, quantum interaction could be an underlying mechanism of biological adaption to the natural environment.

It depends on a rather peculiar situation, here with the single cell, that the environment has to be able to measure a single cell. Now normally that doesn't happen. In our situation, the environment has to make a difference. Normally our gametes, our sperms and our eggs, the environment of them, doesn't make a difference to the eventual intelligence of a person. That may depend on their genes; it doesn't make any difference to the gametes.

So the environment doesn't have the possibility of reaching down into the DNA of the gametes normally because our gametes are kind of separated from the body and protected from the environment. But for single-celled organisms then it does make a difference. The environments actually are reaching down into the DNA of those organisms. It may make a difference in some situations.

Now the situation where it may make a difference even in our bodies is the situation of cancer. In cancer, one of our cells learns to replicate faster and that's a bad thing. It could be that maybe quantum mechanical effects may be responsible for that, particularly as with some cancers, it seems to require lots of different mutations to occur. The frequency of those mutations should be very low. But still we have cancers because they have multiple mutations, and it could be that maybe quantum mechanical effects may help to explain why all those…

Speeds faster.

Yes, exactly.

It's a bit like the situation that I described in E. coli. The non-cancer cells are sitting there not able to grow because the rest of the body essentially is telling them that, “No, don't grow.” But if a mutation occurs, that will allow the cell to escape. Then it allows natural selection within the body, to allow that cell to grow. And at the moment, understanding how all those mutations occur within a single cell is problematic. So it could be that quantum mechanics may allow that kind of process to take place within our body, to cause cancer cells to start to divide.

Is vaccination another example of that? That the bacteria become immune to the vaccination?

No. Become immune to antibiotics, that could be another example. In an organism I work on, the TB (tuberculosis) bacillus, some strains of the TB bacillus are resistant to 15 different antibiotics. Now it's hard to explain how the organism can have so many different mutations. And it could be, again it's speculation, that this kind of effect may be responsible for the frequency of drug resistance, particularly multiple drug resistance occurring in some strains of bacteria.

Is this something that biologists cannot accept?

Biologists don’t really like this explanation. They’ve been trained as classical chemists, mostly bio-chemists. So when you say to a biologist that a particle can be in two places at once, they tend to say “not in my cell, it can’t.”

But recently there has been stronger evidence for quantum mechanical systems or quantum mechanical effects being important, in crucially important biological phenomena such as photosynthesis.

Photosynthesis may depend on quantum coherence taking place within the particles inside photosynthetic cells. Also certain enzymes seem to work by promoting quantum mechanical effects, bringing particles together so close that quantum tunneling takes place between those particles. Enzymes are the crucial operators inside cells and it could be that a crucial part of how they work is dependent on quantum mechanics.

Please stay with us as we will resume our discussion with Dr. Johnjoe McFadden right after these brief messages. Please stay tuned to Supreme Master Television.

Welcome back to Science and Spirituality. We are speaking with British molecular biochemist Dr. Johnjoe McFadden on the genetic aspects of the evolution of biological organisms. Theories from quantum mechanics have not been accepted by biologists thus far in relation to the evolution of life at the cell and DNA level. Dr. Mc Fadden discusses what it would take for this acceptance to occur.

As a physicist I can say there’s not any single doubt in my mind that DNA has, and this proton mutation is, a quantum mechanic phenomena. But how can you prove that the environment does the measurement, interferes with this single proton and drives it to the right mutation?

Yes, it's difficult.

Essentially there are a number of things that need to be done. One of the things that needs to be done, which goes to all the other kind of experiments, is to demonstrate that biological molecules can behave as quantum mechanical systems. And if that is accepted, then at least it gives some platform for people to believe that this can happen.

And then if you take, say, the adaptive mutations phenomenon, where the environment can seem to increase the frequency of mutation, what you have to do is to disprove all the other possible explanations, so that the only one left is the quantum mechanical one. It is a hard one to prove directly. Within these biological systems, there are too many other ways you can explain things. And only if all of the other mechanisms are excluded can you really say the quantum mechanical one is the only one left.

Once you have given that kind of mechanics, I guess the entire evolution can be explained this way. In other words, this idea of random mutations doesn't have to be actually so random.

Well, to a certain extent, but remember that in most situations that have been studied, mutations are random. When people have measured them, they are random to the direction of selection. So it's only in certain situations where there is a problem with that explanation. Then there is a rationale for bringing in this quantum evolution explanation.

Otherwise, in most situations, mutations do appear to be random with regards to the selection. So mostly, Darwinian natural selection is sufficient. So we are only talking about situations where Darwinian natural selection is insufficient to describe the data. Like in this adaptive mutation scenario, like the origin of life, Darwinian natural selection can't explain that.

We asked Dr. McFadden about the DNA information in a cell and whether it is complete.

Let’s say that we have the same cells in the arm and leg and the DNA is identical. Nevertheless, the shape of biological form is completely different. So what is missing?

We know the explanation for that. That’s because although every cell has the same genes, maybe about 20,000, 30,000 genes, only a small fraction of those genes are active in each cell. So a nerve cell will have one set of genes active, a muscle cell will have a different set of genes active, a skin cell will have a different set of genes active.

You can turn one cell into another as shown by stem cells. Stem cells can turn into a muscle cell, a nerve cell, or whatever other kind of cell. And that’s caused by differences in gene expression. So although each cell has the same genes, those genes aren’t necessarily active.

So is it the environment switches them off and on?

Yes, well, that’s then the process of development. Initially in the egg cell, when it’s fertilized, it’s only one cell. And as the cell divides, and become two, four, eight and more cells, then the environment starts to change the cells. One end of the cell may experience a higher concentration of a chemical than other end of the cell. And that may cause it to differentiate. Gradually, the differentiated cells then secrete chemicals that make other cells differentiate because they form a gradient of chemicals.

So, your position is that basically everything is encoded in DNA.

Well, yes, we know, for instance, that although this can’t be done in higher animals, if you take a bacterial cell, take out its DNA, put in another DNA molecule, then that bacterium will grow like that other DNA molecule, the cell that that came out of.

And it doesn’t seem to be anything that isn’t encoded in DNA that determines the characteristics of a cell. It seems to be that there are some things… the cytoplasm may have an effect, and we know from certain situations when a cell divides it not only inherits the DNA, it inherits the cytoplasm, the stuff around the DNA, and that may affect daughter cells. In fact, we know it does affect daughter cells.

Some effects that aren’t in DNA, are transmitted through the cytoplasm. And this is something that is being understood. It’s part of what is sometimes called epi-genetics, genetics outside of, or on top of, the DNA.

We commend Dr Mc Fadden for his open-minded research, showing the possible quantum interaction between the environment and single-cell bacteria DNA encoding, which goes beyond the traditional view based on Darwinian’s theory of evolution. We would like to sincerely thank him for the time taken to speak with us and wish him the very best for his future research in this area.

Thank you, inquisitive viewers, for your company today on Science and Spirituality. Join us next Sunday for another edition, here on Supreme Master Television. Coming up next is Words of Wisdom, after Noteworthy News. With Heaven’s grace, may the entire world soon be unified and in harmony.

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