Quantum‐coherent microtubules as a substrate for organismal pattern memory resolve the integration and causal sufficiency challenges
June 25
Recent experimental evidence, briefly reviewed here, identifies intracellular microtubules in early epithelia and limb blastemas as primary targets of several widely used spindle-modulating teratogens. This observation is consistent with the general hypothesis that the biophysical substrate of long-range morphogenetic control is a collective quantum state of microtubules and was specifically anticipated by the Quantum-Orchestrated Morphogenesis (Q-OM) framework.
We also summarise data indicating that biologically relevant quantum coherence can persist in microtubules at physiological temperature, and present direct spectroscopic evidence for macroscopic quantum entanglement in living planarian tissue that correlates with regenerative fidelity and positional information storage. Having established the physical and developmental plausibility of quantum microtubule states related to pattern memory, we next consider practical advantages of a quantum morphogenetic network and the accompanying theoretical gains for developmental biology.
In particular, we demonstrate how the quantum model makes cellular pan‐informationism a viable solution to the field’s hard problem by solving the pattern integration, or “combination,” problem: how millions of local bioelectric and transcriptional states unify into a coherent, organism-wide blueprint. Postulating a quantum physical substrate for pattern memory resolves this issue in principle but appears to leave us with a causal sufficiency problem—namely, that such states might be epiphenomenal to classical biochemical signaling, leaving their evolutionary conservation unexplained.
Contrary to this intuition, we propose that the quantum approach can also solve the causal sufficiency problem. The Q-OM model shows that microtubule entanglement directly modulates tubulin phosphorylation kinetics, thereby gating canonical Wnt and BMP pathways and conferring a selectable advantage through enhanced robustness of large-scale form. Finally, we outline how the framework accounts for non-algorithmic morphogenetic decision-making and the developmental arrow of time, suggesting testable predictions for opto-quantum modulation of limb regeneration and axis formation.