There are some quantum consciousness cults out there, but plenty of people are interested in investigating the quantum nature of biological effects including consciousness that aren't quacks.
There is also a tendency for some scientists to react dismissively to hypotheses associated with pseudoscience, even when the narrower scientific question is perfectly legitimate.
Reminds me of the visceral reactions in history, like the Rejection of Continental drift (i.e. high level idea was right, but mechanisms hadn't been pinned down yet).
Not claiming that the quantum hypothesis is right, just saying we didn't jump to conclusions.
The question is does any of the interesting counterintuitive QM effects apply to very large structures and that’s where humans being hot dense objects kills most of the more interesting bits of QM.
> didn't jump to conclusions
Thus people aren’t jumping to conclusions, QM itself is saying no here. For the effect people want to apply means QM itself must be wrong. That’s obviously possible but means you need a completely new theory of physics and evidence to support that.
Roger Penrose certainly appears to be a quack when it comes to quantum consciousness and/or brain operation - it seems that he wants to believe it, so waves his hands vaguely in the direction of microtubules as a place it could be hiding, despite zero experimental evidence, or any falsifiable theory. It's not the fact that this flies in the face of everything we know about quantum effects at classical scale and room temperature that makes this quackery - it's the fact that this is just wishful thinking, not science - not the application of the scientific method of falsifiable theory followed by experimentation.
There are even educational demonstrations where people shake bags of 3D printed proteins with magnets (including competing proteins) and you end up with the expected structure.
Photosynthesis depends on quantum behavior: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvFMBRnR3ms
I'll have to look up those demonstrations. I know if I were making such a thing I'd stack the deck in favor of a good demonstration and I'd stick to very simple interactions. But if they've given the potential for random useless tangles a fair shake I'll have to rethink my position.
If somebody has made some analog of ATP synthase which operates in this way it would be just fantastic to behold.
Although if I did relax this position, I'd then be in need an explanation for why all of biochemistry feels like it takes place in some kind of cartoon universe. Like, maybe I've failed to put my finger on the reason, but I can't shake the feeling that the world being presented in biology class is just a little too cute to be this one.
>Although if I did relax this position, I'd then be in need an explanation for why all of biochemistry feels like it takes place in some kind of cartoon universe. Like, maybe I've failed to put my finger on the reason, but I can't shake the feeling that the world being presented in biology class is just a little too cute to be this one.
Here's one possible explanation for this feeling. Consider the alternative world: any time you write a paper about a protein, you have to measure its interactions with every other biomolecule that's present in the cell of interest. Then, you need to model all of those interactions simultaneously. You probably couldn't do that in 10 lifetimes. It's just not practical to do this, so you never read about it. Papers and textbooks necessarily present things in an overly focused way.
So any paper you read has some...selection bias? If you're trying to find a zinc finger that binds some particular DNA sequence, and you find one and it has nanomolar affinity, you don't need to worry about what happens when that ZF binds actin or RNA polymerase or some phospholipid. We already know from the fact that it has nanomolar affinity for its target DNA that it isn't being sequestered by anything else in any measurable way. But its affinity for actin or whatever isn't zero - there IS a number, and they DO interact - it's just that it's incredibly weak and transient, so you're not going to notice it incidentally. Biology may seem cute because the ugly version would cost 20,000x as much to produce.
You seem to talking at cross-purposes to the article - not arguing against the research it is discussing of classical explanations of quantum-like behavior, but wanting to point out that biology is not immune to quantum effects at the scale where that is not surprising.
So every time I act on the basis of such a read event, am I not being guided down one of gulleys that were set up by the designer of my device (or, analogously for biology, by evolution)?
Do you have a link to this explanation?
This being the forum that it is, I was hoping to find an example of this sort of thing: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4066974/ but in electrical engineering instead.
I think you are vastly underestimating the number of collisions required to get an enzyme binding event. We did a back of the envelope calculation in grad school and it was something like >> 10^6 ~ 10^9.
And you can of course do macroscopic things like this:
It's wildly nonintuitive that this manages to happen. Maybe you're right, and it can be explained by the numbers being so tremendously large that they break intuition without the need to import any nonintuitive quantum weirdness.
But if so, isn't such an explanation problematic in its own right? It banishes:
> The quantum world is impossibly nonintuitive, and it's having an effect
in favor of
> The scales here are impossibly nonintuitive, and that's having an effect
Like... we're still shoving the explanation under a rug, it's just now it's a different rug. Either the quantum effects explanation or the large numbers explanation needs further development before we can call this phenomenon adequately explained, and rather than doing that development it seems like the whole field is dedicated to championing their favored side as-is.
Nature is under no obligation to make explanations trivial to a human brain conditioned on quotidian macroscopic observation. Doesn't mean you have to appeal to quantum woo. We know more or less how much "quantum mechanics" (for some definition of QM, obviously an electron shell is QM, but for all intents and purposes you can just treat it as a classical ball that does a few weird things like bonding) contributes, to, say reaction rates. It's nonzero. It's nearly zero, though.
> It leads to improved decision making, experimental design, etc
It does not. It often does the exact opposite.
So in biology the bag, lock and keys are shaped in such a way that you only have to shake for a short time to have multiple keys come out in locks, and in a particular order or pattern too. That's what makes the whole thing kinda magical. And I would not be surprised if quantum mechanics were involved in the chemistry in ways that classical mechanics cannot explain adequately.
EDIT: I started typing this yesterday evening and hadn't hit "send" before going to bed, I hadn't seen the rest of the discussion that had taken place since.
what makes fusion viable at the core is there is a chance for nuclei tunneling through the barrier , that and the sheer size of the sun
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].
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.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09971-3 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-09417-w https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10282-4 https://andrewgyork.github.io/gfp_magnetofluorescence/
https://www.kavlifoundation.org/news/unraveling-the-quantum-...
Edit: FTA, "In photosynthesis, for example, organisms use specialized pigments and proteins to harvest light with nearly perfect quantum efficiency; they convert almost every incoming photon into useful chemical energy."
Edit: this is about standing waves and overtones: "In 2024, Scholes found a way to design complex networks of oscillators such that they produced emergent states — stable patterns of synchronized behavior, like a crowd that claps in time — that could be mathematically described as vectors in a Hilbert space."
I agree. The photographer even has a TED talk about it.
Such a simple concept but really remarkable work.
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.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
1. The mothers cannot be told in advance anything about what will happen to their children, otherwise they will trigger false positives.
2. The objective is not merely to study the population-level rate, but also to engage in CIA-style experimentation whereby the experimenters try to find the few individuals that reproducibly have a substantially higher rate than of the population.
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 theoretical purpose or that one. If you're trying to cram god in there, well it might not be quite spooky enough for that, but so much of what happens in the macroscopic world would not happen if the quantum world were not as strange as it is, and that's doubly true for biology.