Quantum evolution

To fully understand evolution, and life itself, one must be able to grasp quantum theory (quantum mechanics is mostly mathematical equations at the microscopic level and not at all required to conceptually understand quantum systems). General relativity is also a quantum system. 

Seeing time only through clocks and calendars will never give us any kind of appreciation of time on a larger scale. Those are metrics, but are not really time itself. Same with evolution: it exists at many points and flows back and forth. It really can't fit into what we consider as 'time'.  

Biophysicist Werner Loewenstein succinctly presents evolution as a quantum system of information.*  Rather than thinking of evolution following a linear path in time, it is information in the quantum realm, constantly shifting places like tiny sand particles on an ocean beach. 

Thus, evolution is chunks of information existing in the future and the past. What we see is how it manifests only at any point within that realm. There is no moment of 'creation' just as there is no moment of 'end'. Species don't magically appear; they evolve, and devolve. 

"It is difficult to even talk about an instant of time, because we can’t even say with certainty which “chunks” of space-time lie in the future and which in the past." -physicist Jonathan Oppenheim 

Evolution requires us to jump off that restrictive scale and think in terms of shifting sands.

* The Touchstone of Life. Werner Loewenstein, 1998.

Quantum time, quantum people

It's unnerving, and rather irritating, when someone you reconnect with after 4+ decades tries to pin you to a point on a linear time scale, expecting you not to move from that point.

Change is the only certainty in life, perhaps in all reality. Some people box their memories of another on a point in time and expect them to permanently reside there, existing only within the two points on a timeline, their timeline. Then ask many years, timelines, later why we aren't still sitting on that stretch of time. It's worse when that stretch of time is relatively short.

Same could be said of history. History is not just one recollection or explanation of a point or stretch of time. It's multiple recollections, even interpretations. Any narrative of history should always be considered in that way. Partly because of the quantum nature of time, where past, present and future are the same (time flows back and forth, it never stands still). Even if we were present in a point of historical time, our recollection is within the frame of our own mind. And our recollections are biased.

What I eventually realized was that person has pinned his or herself to that point in time, and thus the image of another person occupying that same point never moves on. And neither does the image of his or herself. Those people are prisoners of their own minds, stuck on a small point or stretch of time, refusing (or afraid) to move forward. And expecting other people to be the same. 

                                    Henrik Sorensen/Getty