Re: How much does subatomic improbability affect macro events?

That's quite a topic for discussion!

It is quite possible to contrive a situation where a subatomic event has a
direct effect on a biological system. Schrodinger's famed thought 
experiment with the cat is one example (A cat is put into a box containing a
device that will kill the cat if a certain unstable nucleus decays. The point 
of the experiment was to show that quantum mechanics is weird - it is
predicted that if the box is unopened, then the cat is neither alive or dead 
but a combination of both states).


On the other hand, I recall an article in New Scientist explaining how on a
large scale, the improbabilities at subatomic levels evened out. This is true
when an effect is due to many subatomic processes: a process dependent
on many subatomic processes is very unlikely to deviate from a very small 
set of probable outcomes. This article caught my eye because it 
explained that chaotic systems, which produce large fluctuations in the 
final state from very small fluctuations in the initial state, were not affected 
by quantum fluctuations, which actually tend to blur the fine differences in 
initial states that a chaotic system depends on.


So on one hand we have situations where a single subatomic event 
makes all the difference, and on the other hand we have the sum of many
subatomic processes. The former processes are wildly unpredictable. The 
latter processes are very predictable indeed, unless the system is 
inherently complicated and chaotic, in which case the system may be 
unpredictable, but this is not due to subatomic uncertainties.


I would reckon that most biological systems are at the 'sum of many 
subatomic processes' end of the spectrum, and so quantum fluctuations 
play very little part in biological events. This is simply because biological 
systems are made of vast numbers of atoms, and are not usually in a state 
where one atom can make a profound difference.


DNA, for example, has many repair systems which correct defects which 
occur in the DNA molecule. The causes of mutations are many, but the 
influence of subatomic unpredictability is virtually nil. The random nature of 
mutations is better explained by the random way that DNA defects occur 
due to chemical or biological events, and the randomness here is chaotic 
and complex, not quantum mechanical.


Your other example of an unpredictable event is a heart attack. Again, the 
system is large and complex so once more I would exclude subatomic 
influences, due to the system being large. The complexity of the system is 
itself the cause of its unpredictability. In this case, various processes 
accumulate to make the heart susceptible to damage and then smaller, but 
by no means subatomic, processes tip the heart over the edge into a heart
attack. There is a lot of work on the many ways in which the heart can 
become susceptible to damage and how it is finally tipped over the edge, 
so I'll use that as an excuse not to go into details!