Biology's Quantum Secrets May Be Classical Mimicry, Not True Quantum Effects
Biology might not be quantum, but its math is quantumlike
For decades, scientists have searched for genuine quantum effects in biology, from photosynthesis to bird navigation. But new research suggests that life may not need quantum mechanics at all. Chemist Gregory Scholes and colleagues show that complex classical networks of oscillators can produce 'quantumlike' states that mathematically mimic quantum behavior. These emergent states, described as vectors in Hilbert space, could explain biological efficiency without fragile quantum coherence. The finding challenges the field's assumptions and opens a new direction for understanding life's mysteries.
Maybe quantum biology, at the biggest scales, means using 3 1/2 billion years of evolution to work out how to get the functionality that you could get from quantum systems.
- __MatrixMan__
I feel like "is biology quantum?" gates are kept in a needlessly stringent way.
They say that biological systems are too warm for quantum coherence to persist long enough to have meaningful effects. But if you have some molecule whose conformation is in a superposition of states--however briefly--and then the environment causes it to decohere and take on some fully determined non-quantum shape... that actual shape is still one of many possible ones into which it did not decohere. The environment has still hacked probability to trigger decoherence into this shape and not some other one, and evolution leans on this.
If you took a classical bag and filled it with classical locks and classical keys and just shook it around for a while, none of those keys would end up in the locks. But because of this quantum lubricant, ligands binding receptors do find themselves in the appropriate conformation to facilitate signal transduction, even at low concentrations. It's absolutely astounding that it works at all, and in a fully classical world it wouldn't for the same reason that the keys don't end up in the locks when you shake the bag for a while.
Biology is plenty quantum, and the people who are here to tell you it isn't are citing the abundance of interactions as evidence that it is not quantum, but it's through those many interactions that its quantum nature expresses itself.
Maybe it's not spooky-action-at-a-distance style quantum. Maybe it's not indeterminate enough for this t […]
- dataviz1000
Something similar came up in Neil deGrasse Tyson's StarTalk yesterday. [0]
Neil deGrasse Tyson used the number 8 as an analogy to explain that mathematical similarities between two systems do not mean they share a physical connection -- they were discussing how both the universe and human brain can be described using fractal mathematics. He pointed out that you can count 8 planets in the solar system and 8 children in a room, but having the same count doesn't mean the children are planets.
The similarities say more about mathematics than it does about the universe and the human brain or planets and children.
- smashers1114
I feel like the author was either trying to write to a pretty lay audience or didn't understand the broad applicability of quantum mechanics. There is no threshold either where things are "classical" or "quantum". The systems that may be satisfactorily described by classical mechanics are just those in which the Planck constant may have a value of zero. While in modeling a system using quantum mechanics, it has a finite value.
Computational chemistry is based on different approximation methods for evaluating the interactions of a molecule with another. These methods work well, and as you can imagine form a large portion of biochemistry. Saying "Biology may not be quantum.." in the title seems pretty misleading at best.
Most of the interview quotes are researchers talking about any sort of long term coherence used in a biological organism. The article mentions this in brief but I didn't see a link. For a real cool example of biology pushing quantum limits check out the magnetic field "vision" of birds [0].
- gabia
Maybe birds navigate using quantum effects, maybe not. That's not stopping us from engineering quantum biotechnologies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09971-3
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09417-w
- tesnorindian
How about
Current AI + Quantum Mechanics = AGI?
This is the exact question that was in my mind when I asked if math had the solutions for our problems in Ask HN.
Now I see that math is quantum like for Biology to understand that for AGI we need to solve quantum first.