Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Evolution picks up hitchhikers

We once had an interesting if somewhat heated discussion on the drivers of evolution going.

I was challenged me to make predictions if what I was suggesting as a idea was true

http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-07-evolution-hitchhikers.html

Interesting observation from biological sciences.

Does not prove I am right and it's a long way from falsifying "survival of the fittest" theory but it is interesting.

What I really need to see is generations down the track those hitchhiker genes become crucial in a species to show a proper gene walk and then the biologists will start scratching their heads going how did it know? ... I will simply smile and laugh

The idea that it can take more than one mutation to create a beneficial change in an organism isn't really all that new. Some time back we had a thread about the long term experiment where they kept growing new generations of bacteria and plotting the changes through time. After some 30,000 generations they suddenly developed the ability to use citrates as a food source. When they traced back they found that it actually took 2 mutations to create the ability. The first one didn't have much effect one way or the other, and the second made the big leap. My impression has been that most scientists already look at it that way any how.

Bill Gill

The key difference is that if the process is truly random the gene walks will not always be the shortest possible path you would expect some gene walks to be rather long and convoluted and some even dead ends because they are classical walks.

As I said we see this behavior with all things that can be described by QM that you only find the shortest path which we call a quantum walk.

The background of why it happens is straight forward
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_walk)

=>Quantum walks exhibit very different features from classical random walks. In particular, they do not converge to limiting distributions and due to the power of quantum interference they may spread significantly faster or slower than their classical equivalents.

Again we have no idea why the behavior exists we are simply describing a quantum behavior.

If evolution has some sort of underpin that is working off the same thing(s) that QM describes they will quantum walk rather than classical random walk.

So I am being careful here to say I am not suggesting QM causes evolution but the other way around I am asking can evolution be described by QM.

Remember we are asking the same question of gravity is it classical or quantum?

What I am saying is biology is actually getting very close to a position they could test it which funny enough is actually closer than we are with gravity.

We can't add anything to what evolution is or why it is occurring but it might be nice to have a definitive answer on if it is a quantum process or a classical process ... biology as a science at the moment is assuming classical but I would like to see that tested.

The profile of a linear random quantum walk is not hard





So the question is does a gene evolution follow that quantum probability distribution or not .... so which do we get with Gene evolution RED or BLUE ... answer that and you answer my question.