Well, now you have a whole page of links to things that don't seem to have much to do with DNA, which is what we were discussing. We were discussing how changes in the DNA molecule would cause changes in an organism. At this stage of biological research about all that can be said is that the changes will occur. And at this time the lowest level we can look at is the sequence of nucleotides in the DNA. While this sequence depends on QM to hold it together in a stable way QM will not tell us anything about the result of changes in the sequence of nucleotides. All we can do is look at the pattern of nucleotides and figure out how they relate to characteristics expressed by the organism. Knowing the QM explanation of how they hook up doesn't help much there. The big question facing biology is what is the relationship between the DNA sequence and the characteristics of the organism. Tracking the DNA sequence doesn't depend on QM, it is a primarily classical problem.
While I am sure that there are plenty of people who would love to know the QM explanation of the formation of the DNA and the transcription of the DNA code to an actual organism it is an area that is extremely complex and most biologists can live just fine doing what they can do without it. Face it, learning biology is a full time job, having to learn QM on top of it would create an impossible condition. Getting a PhD would probably extend to something like 20 years.
In other words, evolution depends on changes in a system which closely approximates a classical system, and there is no significant reason to try to get a deeper understanding from a QM standpoint when all it would do would be to make it even harder to understand. Think about interplanetary travel. General Relativity provides a much closer approximation of orbital dynamics than Classical Physics. But they don't use GR, because Classical Physics provides a "good enough" approximation, and is much easier to use.
Bill Gill
