Biology Might Not Be Quantum, but Its Math Is Quantumlike

The piece examines the long-running quest to link life’s processes to quantum mechanics and concludes that biology does not appear to exploit genuine, long-lived quantum states; instead, the mathematics that describes quantum phenomena can emerge from complex classical systems. Early excitement centered on experiments in photosynthesis that seemed to show excitons maintaining coherence and thus exploring multiple energy-transfer routes simultaneously; later work showed those signals came from vibrational resonances rather than sustained quantum coherence. Other phenomena like tunneling in enzymes are real but transient and do not constitute the kind of scalable coherence quantum biologists hoped to find. Warm, noisy cellular environments create rapid decoherence that makes macroscopic quantum effects unlikely.

Gregory Scholes and colleagues propose a different interpretation: networks of interacting, oscillating classical parts can conspire to produce behavior that is mathematically indistinguishable from some quantum predictions - “quantumlike” rather than truly quantum. Their recent papers demonstrate how collective modes in ordinary biological-like networks reproduce interference, coherence-like dynamics, and other features usually associated with quantum systems. Researchers in quantum foundations find this promising because it offers a route for evolution to achieve quantum-like functionality without fragile quantum states, reframing the search for quantum signatures in biology as a search for quantumlike mathematics implemented classically.