...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? What?

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.

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 really obvious when a new device in Life is discovered by brute-force search, because it has no separable components.

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 organization 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].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43152407

[3] https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/03/what-can-we-lear...

[4] https://www.sociable.co/technology/ai-breaks-simulated-laws-...