What is life? Or put a little more poetically: what is the force that through the green fuse drives the flower? Johnjoe McFadden, a reader in Molecular Microbiology at the University of Surrey, believes he has found the answer in the way quantum mechanics governs the dynamics of living organisms.

In Quantum Evolution, McFadden confronts the myriad problems found in neo-Darwinism. He tries to develop an alternative explanation for the origin of life using quantum mechanical concepts. Readers without a fair grasp of this field should only approach this book if they are prepared for a 'long haul'.

In his first chapter, McFadden identifies one characteristic of life which he considers particularly significant. This is the amazing ability of living things to perform 'directed movements' or 'free actions'. For example: '...a fish swimming or a bird flying is initiating its own movement against the prevailing exterior forces'.

In his second chapter McFadden highlights the remarkable resilience of living organisms under extreme environmental circumstances. He believes the ability of certain species of bacteria to thrive under adverse conditions has deep implications for astrobiology and the existence of life elsewhere in our cosmos.

Chapters three and four constitute a quantum mechanical perspective of DNA and the assumed origin of the first self-replicating proto-cells. Here, McFadden points out a number of problems for the neo-Darwinian synthesis, including the role of highly controversial 'adaptive mutations' and the recent identification of irreducible complexity by Intelligent Design theorist, Michael Behe. After criticising a number of speculative possibilities for life's origin, including clay-based catalysis and self-organisation, McFadden concludes with the speculation that quantum mechanical rules give us '...another way to overcome the huge improbability of the first self-replicator'.

In later chapters, McFadden presents various interpretations of the quantum world, which are all empirically indistinguishable. These include Bohr's Copenhagen interpretation, Einstein and Bohm's Hidden Variables interpretation, and the rather unsatisfying and esoteric 'Multiple Universes' interpretation - where each quantum decision splits the universe into a number of parallel universes running simultaneously together. This latter interpretation is the one he favours.

Having cited and acknowledged Michael Behe's powerful challenge to Darwinian evolution, McFadden's main suggestion regarding the origin and evolution of life is that evolution has from time to time taken place in the "quantum multi-verse". If we allow this loaded conjecture, an effect known as the "inverse quantum Zeno effect" is meant to dramatically reduce the odds against the spontaneous generation of life and the origin of irreducibly complex systems. This effect, he believes, ultimately lead to the origin of the first self-replicating proto-cell, and could still be at work in modern organisms - offering some explanation for the mystery of human consciousness. 

In conclusion, this book highlights many of the problems of neo-Darwinism. McFadden's quantum solution to these problems is novel, but requires far more research to be considered plausible. Many readers may find the idea of multiple universes far more problematic for science than Behe's simple design inference.