This is not the first quantum-mechanical biological phenomenon to be suggested: <a href="https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/quantum-science-and-technology/articles/10.3389/frqst.2024.1466906/full" rel="nofollow">https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/quantum-science-and-tec...</a><p>...however the author's claims definitely do not follow in any meaningful way from the actual experiment. A few cytoskeletal proteins did something non-classical, so we have to re-evaluate the place of life in the universe? <i>What?</i><p>I believe this is another steaming pile from the cult of physicists who are convinced that their intelligence is so supreme and special that it must be empowered by a god of the gaps[1]—more specifically a god of the quantum gaps. No such luck, friend.<p>Remember the story about AI-designed chips[2] — what Stephen Wolfram identifies as "lumps of irreducible computation" in his recent article about the Game of Life[3]. As Wolfram notes, it's <i>really</i> obvious when a new device in Life is discovered by brute-force search, because it has no separable components.<p>Biology is such a search algorithm; it moves in (almost) entirely random ways, and it sometimes stumbles upon truly incredible things. On a few occasions it actually stumbled onto <i>organization</i> as a viable technique for innovation, as encapsulation makes it easier to iterate on specific components without messing up the whole system. But on the whole, the mess remains a mess, and sometimes that means exploiting the rules—something virtually all learning algorithms are also prone to do if there are flaws in the rules of the game, e.g. [4].<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps</a><p>[2] <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152407">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152407</a><p>[3] <a href="https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/03/what-can-we-learn-about-engineering-and-innovation-from-half-a-century-of-the-game-of-life-cellular-automaton/" rel="nofollow">https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/03/what-can-we-lear...</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.sociable.co/technology/ai-breaks-simulated-laws-of-physics-to-win-at-hide-and-seek/" rel="nofollow">https://www.sociable.co/technology/ai-breaks-simulated-laws-...</a>