Quora answer: Does the multiverse theory clash affect evolutionary theory or can they run concurrently?

May 22 2014

I think this question needs to be clarified.

I think it is now pretty certain that there is a mutiverse that somehow gives rise to our universe in the Big Bang and we can consider the fact that the universe is still accelerating in its expansion due to dark energy pouring in from somewhere as the greatest evidence for that. But whatever the multiverse is it is not spacetime as we understand it in our universe, and no one knows what it might be, and the chances of ever finding out are somewhat slim.

Now the thing about the Universe that we do know is that the whole thing is entangled because it all had an origin together at the Big Bang. The fact that everything is entangled lends credence to the idea that everything interpenetrates within the universe which is held for instance by Fa Tsang in Hua Yen Buddhism where emptiness is equated with interpenetration. This interpenetration is now thought about in Physics as the Holographic principle and the idea that the universe as three dimensional may be a projection off of a domain wall and that the dimensionality of our universe may ultimately be an illusion.

What we are discovering slowly is that Quantum Mechanical phenomena is not restricted to the micro world and that there are quantum mechanical states in macro phenomena that actually affect macro outcomes. For instance it was recently seen that there is quantum moment in photosynthesis. I am fairly certain that we are going to find that Life itself is based on these quantum phase shifts at the macro level in and out of entangled and superpositioned states.

If that is true, and we find more phenomena like that where Quantum Mechanics counts as having macro effects as Penrose suggested it might for Consciousness in the brain then there is a good chance that quantum mechanical phenomena will end up being linked to evolution in some way.

According to Deutsch in The Fabric of The Universe the multiverse is actually manifest as interference in Quantum Phenomena.

And we know from Kauffman At Home in the Universe that we are dependent on Order arising from nowhere to create life via Negative Entropy.

So, given these sources and what they have said I could envisage a theory that says that the multiverse is seen in our universe as Quantum interference, and Quantum interference occurs even on the macro level, and that somehow speciation is linked to that quantum phase shifts at the macro level, because Evolution has this strange punctuation that was incorporated into the theory by Gould. We do not know how punctuation works when lots of different species are suddenly created, many of which die out, but these speciation events leave their mark on evolutionary history.

For a long time they said that snowball earth was impossible because if it ever occurred the planet could never get out of it. But now we know it has occurred twice. Before they found out that the universe was still accelerating in its expansion physicists would have thought that was impossible. Even the researchers who discovered it couldn’t believe it at first. So there are many strange and hard to believe things about our universe that we are finding. For instance it was only when we found the microwave background radiation that the Big Bang became the dominate theory. It is discovery of the unexpected that drives science. Occasionally we get something like the Higgs particle that was predicted, but the real drivers is not what is predicted by theory but what we discover exists that we would never have guessed like Super Conductivity that took twenty years to explain convincingly. So I would not rule out the idea that there may ultimately be a connection between the Multiverse and Evolution of Species. But as someone else expressed it is hard to think what that might be at this point when thoughts about the Multiverse itself are so new, and since like string theory we won’t be doing experiments any time soon where we can test the various ideas that are being developed. But the very fact that we are taking seriously the idea of the multiverse is a wonderful expansion of the reach of our imagination in science as was string theory itself.

I predict that what we will find is that there are quantum moments all over the place in life, where life takes advantage of some quirk at the quantum level to increase its efficiency and effectiveness of its negative entropy order production. And if more of those quantum shifts are found like the one recently reported in photosynthesis then macro quantum states are going to become more and  more important for explaining now inexplicable things like life, consciousness and social phenomena in species. And the more QM takes on this role in things like Biology and if it turns out that D. Deutsch is right about Quantum interference being multiverses interacting in the substrate of our universe, then the more people may talk about the role of the multiverse in shaping macro phenomena such as evolution within our universe.

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