Quantum Evolution: Life in the Multiverse

Description

How did life start? How did something capable of replicating itself emerge from the primordial soup? How did it defy the odds? And how did it carry on seeking out the very mutations that enable survival? Living organisms are controlled by a single molecule - DNA. Yet the study of physics tells us that the behaviour of single molecules is also controlled by the laws of quantum mechanics. The implications of this for biology have not been fully thought through. Until now. In this debut, Johnjoe McFadden puts forward a theory of quantum evolution. He shows how living organisms have the ability to will themselves into action. Indeed, such an ability may be life's most fundamental attribute. This has radical implications. Evolution may not be random at all, as recent evolutionary theories have taught: rather, cells may, in certain circumstances, be able to choose to mutate particular genes that provide an advantage in the environment in which the cell finds itself.

Johnjoe McFadden is a reader in Molecular Microbiology at the University of Surrey and editor of Britain's leading text book on molecular biology. For more than a decade, Dr McFadden has specialised in examining the genes of tuberculosis and meningitis. He is the inventor of the world's first successful test for meningitis (which received worldwide press, radio and TV coverage) and was the leader of another team that was the first to successfully use artificial life computer programmes to model key transition stages in evolution (also covered throughout the media). Quantum Evolution: the New Science of the Life Force is his first book for a popular audience.