Abstract
We began with a biological question—what lives on and in humans—and quickly moved toward a deeper unifying theme: information. In biology, information becomes “alive” in the Darwinian sense when it is copied with heredity and variation and subjected to selection. You then asked whether physics, especially quantum entanglement across distance, could also support Darwin-like dynamics: states “competing,” information being preserved, and local environments reacting. The resolution is subtle: entanglement creates nonclassical correlations but does not enable remote causal control (no-signaling), while Quantum Darwinism is a well-developed framework where decoherence selects stable states and the environment makes many redundant records of them—giving an experimentally testable, Darwin-analogy mechanism for the emergence of classical reality.
1) The biological starting point: “what lives on/in humans constantly?”
Clarified question
You wanted: How many different species of living beings live in or on the human body constantly, ordered most → least, and all identified.
Key answer (with a realistic constraint)
There is no single finalized “all identified” list for “constant” residents, because microbial discovery is ongoing and “constant” depends on body site and person. A widely used Human Microbiome Project summary is: humans host ~10,000 bacterial species globally, while an individual carries around ~1,000 at a time.
2) “Make it simpler and closer to humans”: animals with brains + hearts that colonize humans
Clarified question
Restrict to “living beings” that feel closer to humans—e.g., animals with a nervous system and a heart-like pump—and list a top 10 colonizers on/in humans.
Key answer
This shifts from microbiomes to mostly arthropods (mites, lice) and a few persistent parasites. The most “constant” true residents among these are Demodex mites, widely described as common/permanent residents of human follicles/sebaceous units.
3) “Ultimate master of Earth” and the “stomach of the world”
Clarified question
Who is truly at the top of the food chain “alone,” not getting eaten like humans?
Key answer
Ecologically, no macroscopic organism escapes being consumed eventually—if not by predators, then by decomposers. Your “stomach of the world” framing is strong: in the long run, the closest thing to the final “consumer” is the decomposer system (microbes, fungi, etc.) that returns biomass to chemistry.
4) “Most likely alien we’ll find”
Clarified question
Is microbial alien life the most likely discovery, and is that because microbes are the most abundant?
Key answer
The conservative mainstream expectation is: first discoveries are likely microbial life or biosignatures, because microbes are robust and because it’s easier to detect chemical/structural traces than complex organisms. NASA’s astrobiology materials explicitly frame a biosignature as any feature that can serve as evidence for past or present life.
5) “One event”: meteorites like Murchison delivering building blocks
Clarified question
Could a Murchison-like meteorite delivering amino acids/organics be “the” pivotal event?
Key answer
Meteorites like Murchison are strong evidence for extraterrestrial delivery of organics (including amino acids), supported by isotopic analyses arguing against simple terrestrial contamination.
But delivery of ingredients is not the same as the origin of Darwinian life.
6) “Good luck explaining origin of life” → your demand for a
specific “spark”
You pushed hard (correctly) against vague “billions of years happened” answers.
The specific “spark” in evolutionary terms
The minimal step from chemistry to evolution is:
A self-copying system with heredity and variation, able to undergo Darwinian evolution—often imagined as an RNA-like replicator in a compartment (a protocell).
This is where “information” becomes a population-level process rather than a one-off chemical pattern.
The “spark closest to humans”
A later pivotal step toward human-level complexity is often framed as eukaryogenesis with mitochondria (energy and cellular complexity jump), although that portion of our discussion was more conceptual than deeply sourced here.
Part II — Your central physics proposal
You proposed a deep analogy:
In physics, matter transforms (fusion/fission), chain reactions branch, and macroscopic systems “fight” toward equilibrium (warm/cold air exchange).
Maybe information is preserved and propagated, possibly even as quantum information over long distances, in an RNA-like way.
Maybe quantum states “compete,” some persist, and this looks Darwinian.
Extend the intuition: perhaps black hole interiors, cosmic expansion, and matter creation are entangled in a way that generates distant change/chaos.
To address this faithfully, we need three separations:
Amplification and equilibration (common in physics)
Darwinian evolution (requires template copying + heritable variation + selection)
Quantum correlations (entanglement) vs quantum-to-classical “selection” (decoherence / Quantum Darwinism)
7) Entanglement: what it is, what it isn’t, and why your “B must affect its environment” intuition breaks
Your core claim
“If A and B are entangled, a change of A updates B; if B is not alone, B must influence its surroundings.”
The precise physics
Entanglement means strong nonclassical correlations in the joint system, but local statistics at B do not become controllably different based solely on what you do at A. This is formalized in the no-communication (no-signaling) theorem: operations on A cannot be used to send information to B faster than light; B’s reduced state (what B can locally access) remains unchanged in the relevant sense.
Thought experiment: the “up/down 50–50” point you arrived at
Suppose A and B share a Bell pair.
If both measure along the same axis, their results are perfectly (anti-)correlated.
But B alone still sees “up” half the time and “down” half the time, regardless of what Alice chooses to measure.
So B’s environment—anything that reacts to “up” vs “down”—sees the same local distribution unless it later receives Alice’s classical record.
“Do we have to change both sides at the same time?”
No. To demonstrate entanglement you measure both sides and analyze correlations. In strong demonstrations, measurement settings are chosen independently and rapidly to prevent classical coordination. This logic underlies Bell tests and “loophole-free” experiments.
How we
prove
entanglement operationally
The standard route is a Bell inequality violation (often CHSH). Loophole-free Bell tests using separated spins in diamond are a canonical example of ruling out local-realist explanations under stringent conditions.
“Long-distance quantum information transfer”
You implicitly gestured toward this with “information passed over long distance.” Quantum teleportation is the clean case: it transfers an unknown quantum state’s identity but requires classical communication, so it cannot be faster-than-light.
8) “Is it only spin/0–1?” Degrees of freedom you can entangle
You asked whether entanglement is only about two-state spin “0/1,” and whether other entangled properties could influence surroundings differently.
Key answer
Entanglement is not limited to spin or two levels. Many degrees of freedom can be entangled (e.g., polarization, path, energy/time-bin, orbital angular momentum), and systems can be qudits (d-level) or continuous-variable modes. The reason qubits dominate technology is engineering convenience, not a fundamental limit.
9) Nuclear fusion/fission and spin: “does spin matter physically?”
You asked whether spin matters in nuclear processes and whether entanglement could change fusion pathways.
Key answer
Spin matters locally in nuclear reaction channels. A concrete example: spin-polarized deuterium–tritium fuel is predicted/argued to increase the D–T fusion cross section by about a factor ~1.5 (≈ 50%) under ideal polarization assumptions.
This is a local spin-physics effect, not entanglement enabling remote control.
Part III — The closest thing to “Darwinism” in quantum physics:
Quantum Darwinism
This is the heart of what you were reaching for: a mechanism where some states persist, others die out, and “information” spreads into surroundings.
10) What Quantum Darwinism claims (in plain scientific terms)
Quantum Darwinism is a framework (associated strongly with Zurek’s program) describing how classical reality can emerge from quantum substrate:
A system interacts with an environment.
Decoherence suppresses certain superpositions.
A preferred set of robust states—pointer states—are “selected” because they are stable under environmental monitoring.
The environment does something crucial: it stores many redundant copies of information about these pointer states, so multiple observers can independently discover the same “classical fact” without strongly disturbing the system.
This “redundant recording” is the Darwin-analogy part: selection (pointer states) + replication (environmental records).
The quantitative signature: the “classical plateau”
A standard diagnostic is the quantum mutual information between the system and fragments of the environment: as you intercept larger environment fragments, information about the pointer state rises quickly and then hits a plateau—meaning many small fragments already tell you the same thing. This plateau is widely described as a hallmark of Quantum Darwinism.
11) Why this is “Darwin-like,” and where it differs from biological Darwinism
The “Darwin-like” correspondences
Selection: only certain states (pointer states) are stable under monitoring.
Replication: the environment makes many copies of pointer information (redundancy).
“Fitness”: stability under decoherence is the “fitness criterion,” not reproductive success.
The difference from biology (important)
Biological Darwinism yields open-ended adaptation because the template (genome) can encode many complex functions and copy with variation. Quantum Darwinism is about which states become objective/classical, not about building complex machines through cumulative selection.
Part IV — Your requested synthesis experiment:
“Two entangled systems, each with surroundings, where entanglement causes a Darwin-like reaction on both sides”
You wanted: A and B entangled, and in both regions the surroundings respond in a Darwinistic way (selection/replication of information).
The correct way to make this physically meaningful (and testable) is:
Entanglement supplies nonclassical correlations between A and B (global structure).
Quantum Darwinism supplies the Darwin-like local mechanism: each system’s environment selects pointer states and redundantly records them.
Entanglement does not remotely trigger environment changes; the Darwin-like reaction is local in each wing—but you can start with entanglement and watch how it transitions into objective classical records.
12) A concrete experimental design you could actually propose to colleagues
Platform options
Superconducting circuits (many controllable qubits, engineered environments).
Photonics (distributed systems, natural “environment fragments” via scattered photons).
A key reason superconducting circuits are attractive is that comprehensive Quantum Darwinism signatures have been demonstrated there in a recent Science Advances paper.
The “two-wing Quantum Darwinism” protocol
Step 0 — Prepare entanglement
Prepare two system qubits A and B in a Bell state.
Step 1 — Verify entanglement (before Darwinism)
2) Perform a CHSH Bell test (or state tomography) to verify nonclassical correlations, using the same logic as loophole-free tests (though a lab implementation may not be spacelike-separated).
Step 2 — Attach environments
3) Couple A to an environment E_A (a register of ancilla qubits or photonic modes).
4) Couple B to an independent environment E_B.
Step 3 — Engineer “copying” into the environment
5) Implement repeated controlled interactions that imprint the pointer-basis value of A into multiple ancillas in E_A, and similarly for B into E_B.
This is the replication element: many environment fragments carry the same record.
Step 4 — Demonstrate the Darwinism signature locally
6) For each wing separately, compute the mutual information between the system and environment fragments as a function of fragment size; look for the characteristic rapid rise + plateau (redundant records).
Step 5 — Demonstrate “selection”
7) Repeat the experiment preparing the system in a superposition of non-pointer states and show that the environment does not redundantly encode that information (it gets decohered away). This operationally shows that the environment “selects” a pointer basis.
Step 6 — Show the entanglement-to-classical transition
8) Track how the initial A–B entanglement degrades as local records proliferate, while classical correlations between records in E_A and E_B (consistent with the initial entanglement structure) become the accessible “reality.”
What this proves (and what it doesn’t)
It proves: (i) entanglement initially, (ii) local Darwinism-like redundancy, and (iii) a controlled transition from nonclassical correlations to objective records.
It does not prove: faster-than-light influence or remote causal control (ruled out by no-signaling).
13) “Chance to prove it”: how realistic is this?
High confidence components (already done in some form)
Bell inequality violations and entanglement verification are routine and have loophole-free exemplars.
Quantum Darwinism signatures (redundant records, branching structure/classicality emergence) have been demonstrated in superconducting circuits in 2025 Science Advances.
The “new” part (your synthesis)
The specific two-wing combination—start with A–B entanglement, then build two independent redundant-record environments E_A and E_B, and map the entanglement-to-objective-record transition—is conceptually straightforward but experimentally heavier:
more qubits / modes,
tighter calibration,
careful accounting of what information is redundantly accessible vs what remains quantum.
In other words: the experimental ingredients exist; the combined demonstration is a credible next-step style experiment rather than science fiction.
Part V — Your biggest takeaway, stated sharply
Entanglement = correlation structure, not a remote control wire. Local “B affects its surroundings” behavior is fixed by B’s locally accessible state; A cannot change that in a controllable way without classical communication.
Your Darwin analogy lands best not on entanglement itself, but on decoherence + redundant records: that is exactly what Quantum Darwinism formalizes and tests.
If you want a “Darwin-like quantum thought experiment,” the right picture is “environmental selection of pointer states + replication of records,” and the right test is the mutual-information redundancy plateau (plus tracking the decay of entanglement and rise of objective classical correlations).
Spin can strongly influence nuclear reaction rates locally (e.g., polarized fusion), but that’s not entanglement-driven remote causation.