*	"It seems to me natural that quantum mechanics must have some
interaction with biology."  (quoting Shipman)

 

I was a Quantum Mechanic long before I ever gave any thought to keeping
bees, so I'll say it plainly - this was woo, nothing more.

 

Back in the 1970s and 80s, we laughed at "Quantum Mysticism" - the books
"The Tao of Physics" and "The Dancing Li Wu Masters" were typical
best-seller attempts to take poorly-understood or badly-framed plain English
descriptions of what is far better explained using math, and use those
analogies to explain or justify "New Age" views of parapsychology, eastern
mysticism, and so on.  Murray Gell-Mann at CalTech minted the phrase
"Quantum Flapdoodle" for all this, and he wrote a very good book - "The
Quark and the Jaguar" where he actually does apply things like the concept
of "Indeterminacy" (from quantum mechanics and chaos theory) to natural
systems and "complex systems", making a solid set of applications of what we
have learned from the quantum framework to "the practical" aspects of
reality and life. 

 

But "mysticism" is only a short step away from things like the recent claim
of a "right-handed neutrino" from the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna.
Many physics nerds swerve deeply into such mysticism at one time or another
but we tend to prefer Gurdjieff's mysticism, Ouspenskii's math and
depression, and Adorno's aphorisms, a path that led me nowhere.

 

TLDR: "Quantum effects" are safely ignored at the scale and speed of
biological processes, just as such effects are safely ignored when building
bridges, tunnels, and even when plotting spacecraft trajectories on long
voyages, even if Voyager 2 was launched before Voyager 1.

 

 

 


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