McFadden agrees with some critics of neodarwinism (i.e. Darwin's hypothesis of natural selection fortified by what we know from molecular biology) that random mutations don't provide a good mechanism to account for major leaps in evolution. However, he rejects the hypothesis of leading intelligent design theorist Michael Behe that a Godlike designer is required to account for macroevolution.
Instead, McFadden suggests that quantum mechanics might provide a mechanism to produce low probability mutations. Indeed, he argues that it might provide a mechanism where, if a single mutation would not be adaptive, there could be multiple mutations at once to get quickly to a more complex system. Relying on the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, McFadden suggests that even if the origin of life required an ultra-low-probability event, far less than one-trillion to one, it might still happen, plucked out of all the possibilities by its own bootstraps, because life can make quantum scenarios real.
His theory seems to involve a form of precognition, or action of the future onto the present. In the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, the entire history of a branch of the universe exists as a block comprising past, present, and future. In some possible branches of the future, near-simultaneous random mutations might help an organism get over the hump of irreducible complexity to the next stable complex state.
But what would make that low-probability event--something McFadden does not call a "miracle" but sounds like one--into an actuality? McFadden invokes an inverse quantum Zeno effect as a way of leading the universe to this low-probability outcome. A series of observations of quantum systems provide a trail of bread crumbs, to the adaptive outcome. But what is doing the series of leading observations? McFadden suggests it may be the organism in its future state.
McFadden's quantum evolution hypothesis is clever and creative, but I don't buy it, just yet. If there is an observer, perhaps that observer is outside the system, like Bishop Berkeley's God. McFadden refuses to invoke God, but he is perhaps providing the Intelligent Design movement with the best mechanism for the actions of their intelligent designer.
Article comments
1 - Evans
"If there is an observer, perhaps that observer is outside the system, like Bishop Berkeley's God."
I haven't read this book, but I'd like to point out that, if the author is truly invoking the many-world's theory of quantum mechanics, no observer is outside the system, and thus this is not a valid point.
An interesting point is that a DNA molecule can act as it's own observer, as an observer doesn't need to be conscious....