Evolution: QUANTUM EVOLUTION

MAKING SENSE OF THE EVOLUTIONARY JUMBLE

You haven't heard of Quantum Evolution before?  Neither have I.  But a cover article in Time this month is about Quantum Computers and their remarkable ability to solve complex problems.  The speed is advanced over digital computers with their 1 or 0 bits because the quantum ones use 1 or 0 for 1 as well as 1 or 0 for 0 which complicates the whole matter beyond my simple level of number understanding.

But it makes some kind of intuitive sense as applied to the linear versus global thinking of the other post on this site I just posted today, 2/28/2014.  My global right brain thinking has been able to grasp some of the complexity and simplicity of evolution my peers are missing.  Maybe the Quantum Computer will have the capacity to do the same.

Why the complexity?  We have several million different animal species living on our planet, each tracing ancestry back to the first animal species that graded imperceptibly from a population of protozoans a couple of billion years ago.  As the first one diverged, as well as successive later ones, the original species often became extinct, but along the variously branched ancestry some survived relatively unchanged for long times, some even to the present.  So as soon as the first branch developed, evolution was no longer linear, and at the next level it was no longer two dimensional.  After a few more levels of branches (although branching of one line could be much earlier or later in time than another branch, the number of possible dimensions becomes astronomical.

Features can be lost, gained, or changed at different rates and types in each line.  Features adaptive to survival are present if the line does not become extinct and may be known only from fossils if the type can fossilize.  Extinct species may or may not leave fossils.  Can a Quantum Computer make sense of evolution.  I doubt it will happen soon because they probably have to be programmed by linear thinking whizzes.  Can they get past the garbage in, garbage out (GIGO) that plagued early computing efforts?

Once biologists get past the problem of differentiating between analogous and homologous features they can make jumps rivaling what a good computer can do to solve evolutionary questions.  Analogous features are like a bat's wing and an insect's wing not sharing a common structure in previous ancestors.  Homologous wings are like a bat's, bird's, and (perhaps) flying reptile sharing wings developed from a vertebrate ancestor's forelimb.

Earlier posts might help my peers understand the importance of the pogonophorans in their central role in evolution of the vertebrate line and the early branching of major lines of the animal kingdom.  If they can't do that they will be mired in past errors making the task impossible.

Joseph G. Engemann     February 28, 2014