The History of Biology in 1,200 Words

Steps in Adding Consciousness to the Life Sciences

Here are, in my view and in 1,200 words, the most meaningful milestones in the history of the life sciences:

In 1809, the biologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck showed that species have ascended from one-celled organisms to humankind as they have acquired new skills and characteristics – changing in response to their milieu and handing down these changes to their offspring.

(In 1859, the natural historian Charles Darwin offered an alternative mechanism: natural selection via mutations – with the mutations being random.)

Surely Lamarck was closer to the truth than Darwin.  The evolutionary process is clearly purposeful, not random.  Life has been advancing toward more orderly, self-perpetuating patterns of sense-perception, information-processing, agility, dexterity, and care for the young.

In the late 1800s, the biologist Gregor Mendel pioneered genetics.

In 1929, the psychologist Karl Lashley proved that memory and perception are distributed, somehow, beyond the brain.  Lashley rendered credible the view that during each mental function, something beyond the brain is using available neurons in certain parts of the brain. 

In the 1940s, the anatomist and bio-electric theorist Harold Burr discovered that around each animal (at every age) there is an electric energy field shaped like an adult animal of that species.

In the early 1950s, the biologists Francis Crick and James Watson, the chemist Rosalind Franklin, and the biophysicist Maurice Wilkins discovered the structure of DNA, which can be found in the genes of nearly all life on Earth.

In the mid-20th-Century, the neurosurgeon, psychologist, and psychiatrist Karl Pribram showed that during perception, the brain transforms what an animal or person sees, hears, tastes, smells, and touches into waves – and then transforms these waves into perceived sights, sounds, tastes, smells, and tactile events. 

Pribram proposed that animals and people perceive everything as the brain resonates with and “reads” – translates from the senses – frequencies of quantum waves.  The brain is a discriminating frequency analyzer.

In the early 1970s, the geodesist Hans Frohlich discovered that each organism is infused with fields that radiate into the environment at specific resonating frequencies.  The frequency of each molecule, cell, tissue, and organ coordinates its behavior with all others.

In 1976, the biophysicist Fritz-Albert Popp proved that living beings emit light that has nothing to do with photosynthesis.  Certain frequencies of these biophotons can switch on body processes when molecules in our cells respond to them.

In Popp’s empirically-proven theory, all living beings emit a permanent current of photons and:

(1)    DNA sends out frequencies.

(2)    Biophoton emissions and DNA together form a single cell into a living being.

(3)    In all life, cells organize and molecules assemble into forms as collective vibrations cause proteins to cooperatively carry out instruction of the DNA and cellular proteins.

(4)    Biophotons are conductors – the binding collective vibrations – orchestrating each living body, getting genes and cells to operate in unison.  And

(5)    Animals exchange photons with each other. 

In 1979, Karl Pribram was proven right:  The neuropsychologists Russell and Karen De Valois proved that brain cells respond not to patterns but to equations.  The equations called Fourier transforms are what translate patterns into waves and back into patterns.

In 1981, the biochemist and scientific philosopher Rupert Sheldrake proposed fields that are rhythmic, resonating frequencies of information – and proposed that they (1) form and organize matter, (2) guide and influence the habits of matter, and (3) serve as the memory of matter.

(Sheldrake went down some rabbit holes and lost much of his credibility, but that key element of his theory remains valid.)

In the 1980s, the quantum biologist Peter Gariaev proved repeatedly that photons arrange in an ordered pattern in the presence of human DNA. 

In these same years, the radiologist and mathematician Walter Schempp discovered that information about shape and other features of an object is carried in quantum fluctuations in the Zero Point Field.  Schempp proved what Hal Puthoff predicted: the Zero Point Field is a vast memory.

(Zero-point information can be assembled into 3-D images.  For example, MRI machines turn information encoded in the Zero Point Field into images – using, as our brain does, Fourier transforms.) 

By the late 1980s, Pribram, Schempp, and the physicist Peter Marcer had all independently discovered that animals and human beings perceive the world by tuning into the Zero Point Field – that we construct our images and sense-impressions of the world out of quantum information.

In the late 1980s, anesthesiologist and psychologist Stuart Hameroff developed the hypothesis that quantum processes are implemented in the microtubules – and thus that the microtubules are the site of consciousness.

Hameroff found coherence among neighboring tubules, which resonate in unison.  These tubules are exceptional conductors of pulses.  Hameroff came to see them as “light pipes” acting as “wave guides” for photons – tiny tracks for light waves throughout the body of each animal and human being.

In 1989, the physicist Roger Penrose proposed that consciousness arises as quantum systems interact with physical systems.  Not from information processing that is mechanical alone -- from neurons and synapses – but from information processing that is both (simultaneously) quantum and mechanical.  Consciousness arises from an influence embedded in quantum spacetime – and is then significantly amplified in the neurons.

In 1992, physicist Kunio Yasue and neuroscientist Mari Jibu proposed that the quantum messaging of the brain takes place through vibrational fields along the microtubules.

In 1994, Pribram, Yasue, Hameroff, and the physicist Scott Hagan jointly proposed a new super-theory about consciousness: 

Brought into coherence and cooperation through quantum communication (mediated by microtubules), photons travel along light paths of the body as if transparent.  At its most basic level, consciousness is coherent light.

And beginning in the years leading up to 1994, Roger Penrose and Stuart Hameroff merged their theories. 

Together, Penrose and Hameroff proposed that the seat of consciousness is in the quantum and electrical activity of the microtubules.

Consciousness arises as microtubules and their connecting proteins influence and are influenced by activity at the synapses between neurons. 

Consciousness is found in the oscillating, resonating quantum wave activity in the rings in the helix-like pathways throughout the lattices of the microtubules. 

If proven, does the Penrose-Hameroff theory – which they updated with new peripheral assumptions in 2014 – solve “the hard problem of consciousness”? 

Does it overturn determinism?

Does it merge scientific approaches to the brain and consciousness with philosophical approaches to ethical values?   

Does it provide a mechanism for free will? 

At a minimum, Hameroff and Penrose have opened up a promising new line of inquiry. And a rich new dialogue between philosophy and science.

In 1998, the physicist Ezio Insinna discovered that microtubules have a signaling mechanism.  He hypothesized that they transfer electrons.

And just last year, in 2022, Hameroff and the biophysicist Jack Tuszynski demonstrated that anesthesia augments “delayed luminescence” – the re-emitting of trapped light by microtubules (and tubulins).  They are now investigating whether this phenomenon arises from super-radiance or has some other quantum origin.

(To oversimplify, anesthesia is important because it can “turn off” consciousness and thus show us what “turns on” consciousness.)

Also in 2022, the chemist Gregory Scholes and nano-biologist Aarat Kalra excited the molecules within tubulins – with lasers – causing unexpectedly long and wide excitations through microtubules.  And this did not occur when repeated under anesthesia.  (However, we need to be careful not to make too much of these preliminary results, as this is such a complex activity of the brain.)

No matter how valid the 1994 super-theory and the 1994 / 2014 Penrose-Hameroff theory prove to be, the consensus in 21^st Century brain research is that consciousness arises from brain activity coupled to self-organizing ripples at a fundamental level of physical reality.

That now seems indisputable, and so does this: In every moment of life, from that dynamic unfolding and enfolding called the Zero Point Field, each animal and human brain transforms zero-point energy and information, as they enter our senses, into our perceived reality.