Editor's Blog
We recently reported on a breakthrough in artificial photosynthesis. Now, new experiments at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and UC Berkeley have shown that photosynthesis uses quantum entanglement to harvest sunlight for electrochemical energy at near-perfect efficiency. (Earlier experiments had shown that photosynthesis utilized quantum mechanical effects, but this is the first to show the use of quantum entanglement.)
Quantum entanglement is an aspect of particle physics so bizarre that Einstein could never accept it (he famously referred to it as "spooky action at a distance"). When two or more atomic-scale particles such as electrons become entangled, they stay linked and act as a single object: a change in one is instantly reflected in the other, no matter how far apart they become.
These new experiments with the Fenna-Matthews-Olson (FMO) photosynthetic light-harvesting protein found in green sulfur bacteria show that solar photons generate coherent, wavelike oscillations in the protein complexes. These "quantum beating" signals enable the donor and acceptor molecules to sample all potential energy pathways at once, and choose the most efficient.
This is the first time entanglement has been shown in the complex chemical environment and at the relatively high temperatures of a biological system, and for relatively long timescales. (Picoseconds are a long time in the quantum world.) The knowledge could be applied to improve artificial photosynthetic systems and quantum computers.
So, while scientists are only now figuring out how to use quantum entanglement for teleporting information and energy, in macroscale mechanical systems, or possibly to power a faster-than-light spacecraft, it turns out every plant on Earth has already been using it for useful work. And plants inherited that ability from their cyanobacteria ancestors, who started using it at least 2.4 billion years ago. Now that’s spooky.
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9 Comments
Here we are tinkering with atoms and just now starting to play with Large Hadrons and smashing them together, fantasizing about future applications of quantum entanglement.
But we have trees doing this now… and they have been doing this for millions of years.
I’m convinced that technology feebly tries to imitates nature… not the other way around.
Yup. The world is a big accident and there is no Intelligent Creator. Scientists are the stupidest smart people in the world.
OK, I have to put something in here.
To my thinking, it is very likely that all life uses quantum effects. In fact, I’d bet good money (if I had it) that the human brain is a quantum machine of some kind, we just don’t have the science to figure it out yet.
Evolution is an immensely efficient and powerful problem-solving engine. Evolutionary dynamics, simulated through the use of genetic algorithms in computers, can solve incredibly thorny optimization problems (like optimal flow through pipelines, to cite one among a great many examples).
Biological evolution has had billions of years to implement the blind-variation-and-selective-retention approach to the problem of optimizing the flow-through of solar and other energies. It does not surprise me to find such sophisticated processes at work. Indeed, I’ve noted in the past that the brain runs analogue simulations of the world (utilizing evolutionary dynamics on the neural level, if you follow Edelman [cf. _Neural Darwinism_, or _Bright Air, Brilliant Fire_] ). So the fact that we are able to conceptualize and discover these processes in photosynthesis seems to partake of the same process (at a different scale of space and time) which gave rise to it in the first place!
Whether you choose to see this as a stochastic process of great computational power, or as a glimpse into the operation of a Divine Mind, it’s pretty cool stuff!
This is significant discovery which brings many more questions. It’s interesting how widespread is using of quantum effects in nature. And how long ago it came to existence. I have not seen so far any explanation how such complex machinery could emerge during evolutionary process.
Exactly! All problems are already solved by nature. And by us, if only the intelligent creator would’ve included a user manual.
In the High Middle Ages, St. Bonventura wrote a tract called “The Mind’s Road to God,” in which he posited the existence of a rational Creator, who created a rational world, based on His reason. Part of that Creation was man, whose own rationality was posited to embody that of the Creator. Thus, per Bonaventura, the act of using rationality to comprehend the nature of that creation is, in effect, an act of devotion, which moves man toward salvation, in that it places him in harmony with the Mind of the Creator.
Though not a theist myself, I recognize that stating definitively that there is no Creator is just as much an unprovable metaphysical proposition as stating the opposite. So, I don’t.
However, it concerns me that much of the Intelligent Design argumentation can serve to halt the process of searching for the mechanisms of the universe, rather than advance it. It does not serve us to say, “because this is so sophisticated, that PROVES that there is an Intelligence behind all of this,” since that unduly blends two distinct levels of analysis (the WHAT and the WHY). Just as unhelpful is the statement that, because we can comprehend the natural processes by which things operate in the universe, then that PROVES that there is NO God, for the same reasons.
I think of the universe as containing/embodying its own user’s manual, since the learning is part of the doing, which is all part of Being. Whether you choose to view that as an act of spiritual devotion, or as a self-referential enaction of the self-organizing, evolutionary information-processing woven into the structure of the universe (including the brains doing the learning), it amounts to much the same thing. There is no conflict, but that we impose it (which is also part of the process, I suppose, but it seems to me to be something of an evolutionary cul-de-sac).
Evolution is only efficient “enough”. Efficient enough to find or hover around a local maxima satisfying utility function that the permutation mechanism does not break out of. It is a GA, and one in this case with a fundamental utility function to survive and replicate. It is extremely unlikely that a genetic algorithm like this will find the best possible solution except by chance. But it will often find a surprisingly good solution. The variation is not blind. It is small changes on top of what is already there, not total reshuffles on every “hand”. That is part of why it can fail to break out of a local maxima even if a better solution exists outside its variance range.
Quite right: one of the beauties of evolutionary dynamics is that they tend, through repeated, recursive iterations, to arrive at solutions which are *good enough,* rather than the potentially infinite questing after the *perfect* one.
Because the problem space in biological evolution is so vast, and the conditions which pertain to the myriad sub-sectors of the overall topology are so diverse, the risk of any subset of the overall universe of problem-solving agents becoming trapped in local minima is offset by the breadth of the overall “project.” Thus do you get, for example, Neanderthals who are are exquisitely well-adapted to a constrained set of environmental factors, ultimately being outcompeted by the more versatile Homo Sapiens who can function in a far broader range of environmental conditions. Bad for Neanderthals. Good for the overall adaptation of the hominid branch of mammalian evolution.