Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Quantum darwinism

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result of the debate was keep. Mailer Diablo 10:17, 7 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Quantum darwinism

Reason why the page should be deleted David R. Ingham 18:21, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

This afd nomination was incomplete. The nominator's reasoning was It sounds like my uncle Herbert Ingham's pseudoscience to me. The princiles of evolution an quantum mechanics are much to different for their to be such a connection.. Listing now. —Crypticbot (operator) 15:15, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

Wojciech Zurek is a top researcher in quantum decoherence and is a Phi Betta Kappa scholar. This is his theory and I have received emails from him that my interpretation is close to his. In considering this matter please refer to his paper Quantum Darwinism and Envariance. It provides many interpretational sections on his theory and is relatively transparent. Here is one quote:

Quantum Darwinism differs from the traditional approach suggested by the von Neumann model of quantum measurement and offers a new perspective on the emergence of the everyday classical reality that is complementary to the one suggested by decoherence: Selection of preferred states occurs as a result of the ‘selective advertising’, a proliferation of the information about the stable pointer states throughout the Universe. This view of the emergence of the classical can be regarded as (a Darwinian) natural selection of the preferred states. Thus, (evolutionary) fitness of the state is defined both by its ability to survive intact in spite of the immersion in the environment (i.e., environment-induced superselection is still important) but also by its propensity to create offspring – copies of the information describing the state of the system in that environment. I show that this ability to ‘survive and procreate’ is central to effective classicality of quantum states. --Jockcampbell 16:16, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• Keep and clean up.--Ezeu 16:55, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• Delete, still. This may be valid original research, as you claim, but that doesn't belong in Wikipedia either. About the physics, it appears that he is trying to re-invent statistical mechanics. David R. Ingham 18:28, 1 February 2006 (UTC) (Uncle Herb was a Cal Tech graduate.) David R. Ingham 18:49, 1 February 2006 (UTC)

• Keep. I have no idea how sensible this theory is, but it's been published in major mainstream peer-reviewed journals, or am I missing something? The article is actually excellently sourced. Lukas ^(T.|@) 22:28, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
• Keep. It's a loopy theory, with a silly name (and the article is wrongly capitalised), but its existence and content is verifiable (and we have articles on loopier but more popular theories). --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 22:31, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
• Keep per Mel Etitis. Rory096 00:16, 2 February 2006 (UTC)
• Keep Alleged "pseudoscience" is encyclopedic; see Phrenology. That said, I realize that I can be sarcastic and caustic (can't we all), but we should be careful in our nominating rationale to not be uncivil especially to newbies. Carlossuarez46 22:26, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Discussion

[This might really belong on the Talk page, but so long as it's reasoanbly short it can stay here for the moment.]

As I am the author of the entry under consideration but am relatively new to Wikipedia and am unsure of the quality of argument required to trigger the deletion of a page I will present a detailed and referenced refutation of this nomination for deletion. The nominator expresses two unsubstantiated points.

First: It sounds like my uncle Herbert Ingham's pseudoscience to me.

This point is easy. Quantum darwinism is the integration and perhaps the culmination of several topics of research carried out by Wojciech Zurek of Los Alamos National Laboratory and a group of collaborators over the past 25 years. These topics include decoherence,pointer basis and einselection and their numerous articles have been published in peer reviewed journals. A small subset of these papers are linked on the page and I will provide them here for easy reference:

• Quantum Darwinism and Envariance
• Quantum Darwinism: Entanglement, Branches, and the Emergent Classicality of Redundantly Stored Quantum Information
• Environment as a Witness: Selective Proliferation of Information and Emergence of Objectivity in a Quantum Universe
• PROBABILITIES FROM ENTANGLEMENT, BORN’S RULE FROM ENVARIANCE
• Decoherence and the Transition from Quantum to Classical—Revisited

If the theory of quantum darwinism cannot qualify as true science then very little can.

Second: The princiles of evolution an quantum mechanics are much to different for their to be such a connection.

This objection, is more plausible and may well be the unexamined opinion of the nominator but the connections between evolution and physics has been championed and documented by some of the most illustrious modern physicists including John Archibald Wheeler and many of those he taught and mentored. Zurek, a Phi Betta Kappa scholar and a former student of Wheeler's writes:

Both of these themes – quantum natural selection and envariance – have benefited from the inspiration and support of John Archibald Wheeler. To begin with, one of the two portraits displayed prominently in John’s office in Austin, Texas, was of Charles Darwin (the other one was of Abraham Lincoln). This was symptomatic of the role theme of evolution played in John’s thinking about physics (see, e.g., Wheeler’s ideas on the evolutionary origin of physical laws10). While I was always fond of looking at the ‘natural world’ in Darwinian terms, this tendency was very much encouraged by John’s influence .It seems quite natural to look at the emergence of the classical as a consequence of a quantum analogue of natural selection.

Another of Wheeler’s former students, David Deutsch, the founder of Quantum Computing and winner of this years $100,000 EDGE OF COMPUTATION SCIENCE PRIZE considers evolutionary theory along with quantum physics two of the four strands of knowledge that when understood in an integrated fashion will provide a deeper understanding of reality: David Deutsch's site

Lee Smolin, another distinguished physicist, has proposed the theory of cosmological natural selection to explain the existence of the finely tuned fundamental physical parameters making our complex universe possible. Smolin writes of the connection between physics and Darwinian processes:

There is only one mode of explanation I know of, developed by science, to explain why a system has parameters that lead to much more complexity than typical values of those parameters. This is natural selection.

Daniel Dennett, of Tufts University, perhaps America’s best known philosopher, in his book Darwin’s Dangerous Idea, describes how Darwinian theory is proving a powerful tool in many areas of research. He describes it as a ‘universal acid’ that eats away at our anthropomorphic world view. New fields of study abound having an ‘evolutionary’ prefix. Here are a few of the many with Wikipedia links: evolutionary psychology,evolutionary linguistics,evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary economics.

In short, although some minds are ignorant of the well reasoned connections that have been made by reputable researchers between evolution and quantum physics, as well as numerous other fields, that does not mean that these connections have not been made and have been found by many to be compelling.

I cannot help but reflect that Wikipedia itself may well be seen as the accumulation of a body of knowledge due to a Darwinian process and appreciate that a mechanism is required to ensure the non-survival of entries reflecting vandalism, ignorance or cant. I trust that this mechanism is capable of properly evaluating these unfounded objections to the quantum darwinism page. --Jockcampbell 03:31, 2 February 2006 (UTC)

With regard to one or two points made here: first, Dennett might be America's best-known philosopher (I doubt it, but I might be wrong), but he's not a very good one — and you don't even refer to him as commenting on this particular theory (your argument seems to be: Dennett says that Darwinism is a pwerful tool, this theory refers to Darwinism, therefore this theory must be sensible/true/useful...). Secondly, citing other loopy theories like evolutionary epistemology and evolutionary economics doesn't do much to convince.

The points that I and others have made above are the ones that are key to whether or not the article should stay; telling editors that they're too dim or ignorant to understand the subject of the article probably isn't the most sensible way to argue against deletion. --Mel Etitis (Μελ Ετητης) 14:53, 3 February 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.