“Evolution finds a way” is one of those phrases that becomes more impressive the less closely we inspect it. Give life enough time, the argument goes, and it will exploit any useful trick the universe permits. Somewhere, a bacterium must already have solved the engineering problem troubling your laboratory. It simply neglected to publish.
There is a sensible intuition here. Natural selection can preserve remarkably effective solutions. But the phrase also gives evolution an imaginary research department: patient, comprehensive, and steadily working through the catalogue of physical possibilities. The actual process has neither a catalogue nor a department.
That distinction matters for the questions raised by Elise Cutts’s recent article in Quanta Magazine. The article explores physicochemical networks whose behaviour resembles aspects of quantum mechanics mathematically, even though the relevant dynamics are classical. It invites a reconsideration of what, exactly, we expect evolution to have discovered.
First, some housekeeping. Biology already depends on quantum physics: its molecules could hardly opt out. More specifically, hydrogen tunnelling is implicated in enzyme reactions, as Judith Klinman and Amnon Kohen discuss. That observation is distinct from the more ambitious possibility that organisms maintain delicate quantum coherence and exploit it as a functional resource. Evidence for tunnelling does not automatically establish that larger claim.
The temptation is to bridge the gap with evolutionary confidence. If quantum coherence could improve energy transfer or information processing, surely billions of years would have produced organisms capable of using it. Nature has had an enormous head start. Surely it would have found the shortcut.
The difficulty sits inside that final “surely.”
Selection acts on available, heritable variation. Mutations do not arrive because a future application needs them. A potentially advantageous arrangement may require intermediate changes that offer no benefit, impose costs, or disrupt something indispensable. Physical possibility sets a broad boundary; evolutionary accessibility depends on the particular starting point and the routes available from it.
Chance also intervenes: beneficial variants can disappear through genetic drift, environments change, and a promising lineage can vanish before its advantages become established.
Even an accessible mechanism must pay its bills. Its benefits depend on conditions, construction costs, maintenance, and competing demands. A molecular arrangement that performs beautifully in isolation might be an expensive nuisance inside an organism. Evolutionary success concerns reproduction in particular circumstances, with whatever machinery happens to be available.
This makes Gregory Scholes’s proposal especially interesting. In his work on quantumlike states, carefully structured classical networks can produce collective states with mathematical properties analogous to quantum states. Coupled oscillators provide a route to some of the relevant behaviour. Whether this supplies useful computational advantages, particularly in brains, remains an open question in that work.
For an evolutionary argument, the possibility shifts attention towards function. Suppose a particular form of interference helps a system distinguish signals or coordinate activity. If ordinary oscillatory dynamics can deliver that benefit under biological conditions, those dynamics become a plausible subject for selection. The advantage would depend on what the system accomplishes and what accomplishing it costs.
There is no evolutionary bonus for using the more glamorous vocabulary.
Still, mathematical resemblance needs careful handling. Waves can reinforce or cancel one another in classical systems. Sharing such behaviour with quantum systems does not confer every quantum capability. As the Quanta article notes, classical constructions face resource limitations when reproducing more elaborate quantum operations. A useful analogy comes with boundaries.
There are concrete reasons to investigate the functional possibilities. In a 2025 study by Felix Effenberger and colleagues, simulated networks with oscillatory dynamics outperformed comparison architectures on measures including learning speed, noise tolerance, and parameter efficiency. These were computational results. They provide grounds for investigating related biological mechanisms while leaving their evolutionary history unresolved.
Four claims therefore deserve separate attention: a mechanism can exist; it does exist in an organism; it contributes to a useful function; and natural selection favoured it because of that contribution. Each step needs evidence. A convincing demonstration of the first can leave the other three entirely open.
The last distinction is particularly easy to overlook. Present usefulness does not explain a trait’s origin. A feature may arise as a consequence of another feature, then acquire a useful role later. This was a central concern in Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin’s critique of adaptationism. An attractive account of what something is good for can become a story about why it evolved before anyone has established the connection.
Quantumlike behaviour could likewise emerge from network organisation selected for other reasons. It might subsequently become useful. It might also be mathematically striking while contributing little to the organism. These possibilities call for different experiments, even when they begin with the same equations.
The productive version of “evolution finds a way” is therefore a research invitation. Look for accessible mechanisms. Measure their costs. Disturb the proposed dynamics and test whether performance changes as predicted. Investigate whether the relevant differences are heritable and affect reproductive success. Keep the physical, functional, and historical questions connected, but distinguish the evidence for each.
Evolution has produced enough extraordinary machinery to justify curiosity. Its history gives us no guarantee that every useful possibility has been realised. The most interesting question is how a particular organism came to do a particular thing—and what evidence would persuade us that we understand it.
The bacterium may indeed have found a remarkable trick. We still have to catch it doing it.
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