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Is DNA spooked by quantum physics?

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Some physicists suspect so.

Were we talking about wormholes created between entangled quantum particles yesterday?

From Technology Review:

There was a time, not so long ago, when biologists swore black and blue that quantum mechanics could play no role in the hot, wet systems of life.

Since then, the discipline of quantum biology has emerged as one of the most exciting new fields in science. It’s beginning to look as if quantum effects are crucial in a number of biological processes, such as photosynthesis and avian navigation which we’ve looked at here and here.

Now a group of physicists say that the weird laws of quantum mechanics may be more important for life than biologists could ever have imagined. Their new idea is that DNA is held together by quantum entanglement. More.

TR cautions that it is “Speculative but potentially explosive work.” Worth asking about, anyway.

For one thing, it may help underpin epigenetics, the question of how and why genes become active:

One tantalising suggestion at the end of their paper is that the entanglement may have an influence on the way that information is read off a strand of DNA and that it may be possible to exploit this experimentally. Just how, they don’t say.

Okay, so genetic determinism is toast and we can’t get our fortunes told by 23andMe? But how big a problem is that?

Comments
semi related: The Spindle Assembly Checkpoint Mechanism and the Consequences of its Dysfunction - J. Mclatchie - Dec. 10, 2013 The spindle assembly checkpoint pathway is an elegantly engineered surveillance system for protecting the cell from the adverse consequences of improper kinetochore-microtubule attachment. Proper attachment of kinetochores to microtubules is monitored by tension-sensing and by detection of attachment of the ends of the microtubules to the kinetochores. Even a single unattached kinetochore is sufficient to trigger the wait anaphase signal, which inhibits activation of the APC that drives entry into anaphase. Impairment of the spindle assembly checkpoint pathway can result in aneuploidy, a contributor to cancer and developmental abnormalities such as Down’s syndrome. http://jmclatchie.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/the-spindle-assembly-checkpoint.html DNA - Replication, Wrapping & Mitosis - video https://vimeo.com/33882804bornagain77
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What is interesting about finding quantum entanglement within the heart of molecular biology, indeed 'holding DNA together', is that no story within space-time can describe quantum entanglement:
Looking Beyond Space and Time to Cope With Quantum Theory - (Oct. 28, 2012) Excerpt: To derive their inequality, which sets up a measurement of entanglement between four particles, the researchers considered what behaviours are possible for four particles that are connected by influences that stay hidden and that travel at some arbitrary finite speed. Mathematically (and mind-bogglingly), these constraints define an 80-dimensional object. The testable hidden influence inequality is the boundary of the shadow this 80-dimensional shape casts in 44 dimensions. The researchers showed that quantum predictions can lie outside this boundary, which means they are going against one of the assumptions. Outside the boundary, either the influences can't stay hidden, or they must have infinite speed.,,, The remaining option is to accept that (quantum) influences must be infinitely fast,,, "Our result gives weight to the idea that quantum correlations somehow arise from outside spacetime, in the sense that no story in space and time can describe them," says Nicolas Gisin, Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland,,, http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121028142217.htm etc..etc..etc.. An Interview with David Berlinski - Jonathan Witt Berlinski: There is no argument against religion that is not also an argument against mathematics. Mathematicians are capable of grasping a world of objects that lies beyond space and time …. Interviewer:… Come again(?) … Berlinski: No need to come again: I got to where I was going the first time. The number four, after all, did not come into existence at a particular time, and it is not going to go out of existence at another time. It is neither here nor there. Nonetheless we are in some sense able to grasp the number by a faculty of our minds. Mathematical intuition is utterly mysterious. So for that matter is the fact that mathematical objects such as a Lie Group or a differentiable manifold have the power to interact with elementary particles or accelerating forces. But these are precisely the claims that theologians have always made as well – that human beings are capable by an exercise of their devotional abilities to come to some understanding of the deity; and the deity, although beyond space and time, is capable of interacting with material objects. http://tofspot.blogspot.com/2013/10/found-upon-web-and-reprinted-here.html
As should be needless to say, Theists have beyond space-time cause to appeal to to explain finding quantum entanglement 'holding DNA together' whereas materialists, particularly neo-Darwinists, don't! Supplemental notes: It is very interesting to note that quantum entanglement, which conclusively demonstrates that ‘information’ in its pure 'quantum form' is completely transcendent of any time and space constraints, should be found in molecular biology on such a massive scale, for how can the quantum entanglement 'effect' in biology possibly be explained by a material (matter/energy) 'cause' when the quantum entanglement 'effect' falsified material particles as its own 'causation' in the first place? (A. Aspect) Appealing to the probability of various configurations of material particles, as Darwinism does, simply will not help since a timeless/spaceless cause must be supplied which is beyond the capacity of the material particles themselves to supply! To give a coherent explanation for an effect that is shown to be completely independent of any time and space constraints one is forced to appeal to a cause that is itself not limited to time and space! i.e. Put more simply, you cannot explain a effect by a cause that has been falsified by the very same effect you are seeking to explain! Improbability arguments of various 'special' configurations of material particles, which have been a staple of the arguments against neo-Darwinism, simply do not apply since the cause is not within the material particles in the first place! Yet it is also very interesting to note, in Darwinism's inability to explain this 'transcendent quantum effect' adequately, that Theism has always postulated a transcendent component to man that is not constrained by time and space.
Does Quantum Biology Support A Quantum Soul? – Stuart Hameroff - video (notes in description) http://vimeo.com/29895068 Alain Aspect and Anton Zeilinger by Richard Conn Henry – Physics Professor – John Hopkins University Excerpt: Why do people cling with such ferocity to belief in a mind-independent reality? It is surely because if there is no such reality, then ultimately (as far as we can know) mind alone exists. And if mind is not a product of real matter, but rather is the creator of the “illusion” of material reality (which has, in fact, despite the materialists, been known to be the case, since the discovery of quantum mechanics in 1925), then a theistic view of our existence becomes the only rational alternative to solipsism (solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s own mind is sure to exist). (Dr. Henry’s referenced experiment and paper – “An experimental test of non-local realism” by S. Gröblacher et. al., Nature 446, 871, April 2007 – “To be or not to be local” by Alain Aspect, Nature 446, 866, April 2007 (Leggett's Inequality)
verses and music:
1 Corinthians 2:14 The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. John 1:1-3 In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made. Todd Agnew – This Fragile Breath http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hoGPG4JOcXs Brooke Fraser – Lord of Lords(Legendado Português) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rkF3iVjOZ1I
bornagain77
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