Two decades ago, scientists seemed on the verge of understanding biology in a new, quantum way.

Life unfolds over an incomprehensible span of scales, from our planet-enveloping biosphere at one end, to individual cell-building biomolecules at the other. Even at its most microscopic, though, biology doesn’t really reach down to the quantum realm, in which particles act like waves, become entangled with one another, and exist in superpositions of multiple states at once. But scientists in the field of quantum biology are searching for ways that organisms might be able to push quantumness into the space, time, and temperature domains relevant to life, to make use of its strange properties.

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. In 2007, new evidence suggested that life might accomplish this feat by taking advantage of a quantum effect called coherence. The result buoyed the controversial idea that, despite being a warm, wet, and decidedly classical environment, a living cell could maintain — and even exploit — fragile quantum states.

Gregory Scholes, a chemist at Princeton University, was initially enthusiastic about the result. He and colleagues followed up with experiments on photosynthesizing proteins and pigments and came away with similar conclusions. But today, Scholes is skeptical that quantum effects play a role in life. In fact, he’s convinced that the way forward for quantum biology might not be quantum at all. Rather than taking advantage of genuine quantum effects, Scholes proposes, life might be imitating them instead. In several papers published over the past three years, Scholes and colleagues have shown that complex networks of classical objects can conspire to produce phenomena that mathematically mimic quantum objects.

Don’t be fooled: The states that these networks produce are not truly quantum; they’re only “quantumlike.” They arise when many interacting, oscillating parts add up to a collective whole whose behavior obeys the same mathematics that makes predictions about the quantum world.