THE EUROPEAN robin we met in chapter 1 has successfully overwintered in the Mediterranean sunshine and is now hopping between the sparse woodland and ancient stones of Carthage in Tunisia, fattening herself on flies, beetles, worms and seeds, all composed of biomass spun out of air and light by the quantum-powered photosynthetic machines we call plants and microbes. But the sun now climbs high in the midday sky and its fierce heat has dried the shallow streams that wind through the woodland. The forest is becoming parched and inhospitable to our European passerine. It is time for her to move on.
It is now late in the day, and the tiny bird flies up to perch on a branch high in a cedar tree. She carefully preens herself, just as she did many months before, while listening to the calls of other robins who have similarly felt an avian urge to ready themselves for a long flight. As the last rays of the sun dip below the horizon, the robin turns her beak toward the north, spreads her wings and launches herself into the evening sky.
The robin flies toward the North African coast and continues across the Mediterranean, taking pretty much the same route, but in the opposite direction, as she took six months earlier, guided once again by her avian compass with its quantum entangled needle. Every beat of her wings is powered by contraction of muscle fibers whose energy has been delivered by quantum tunneling of electrons and protons through respiratory enzymes. After many hours she reaches the coast of Spain and alights within a forested river valley of Andalucía, where she rests surrounded by abundant vegetation including willows, maple, elm and alder, fruit trees and flowering shrubs such as oleander, each a product of quantum-powered photosynthesis. Odorant molecules waft into her nasal passages, locking onto odor receptor molecules and triggering quantum tunneling events that send nerve signals, via quantum coherent ion channels, to her brain telling her that citrus flowers are nearby, attended by tasty bees and other pollinating insects that will provide her with additional sustenance for the next stage of her journey.
After many days of flight the robin finally finds her way back to the Scandinavian spruce forest from which she set out many months before. Her first job is to search out a mate. Male robins arrived several days earlier and most have found suitable nesting sites that they advertise to the females with their song. Our robin is attracted to a particularly tuneful bird and, as part of their courtship ritual, enjoys several tasty grubs collected by the male. After a brief coupling the male’s sperm is united with the female’s egg cell and the quantum-based genetic information encoding the form, structure, biochemistry, physiology, anatomy and even song of each pair of birds is almost flawlessly copied into a new generation of robins. The few quantum-tunneled errors will provide the raw material for future evolution of the species.
Of course, as we have emphasized in previous chapters, we cannot yet be sure that all the features we have just described are quantum mechanical. But there is no doubt that much of what is or was wonderful and unique about robins, clownfish, bacteria that survive beneath the Antarctic ice, dinosaurs that roamed the Jurassic forests, monarch butterflies, fruit flies, plants and microbes derives from the fact that, like us, they are rooted in the quantum world. There is much that remains to be discovered; but the beauty of any new area of research is the sheer unknown. As Isaac Newton said: