The physical principles behind refrigeration are witnessed in several places in nature.
Being able to communicate non-visibly without giving away our position audibly would be a huge advantage (until your predators/competitors figured it out).
Life isn't generally suitable to the use of really high energies like X-rays because it damages cells. It isn't suitable for low energies because it is difficult to create an individual receiving/broadcasting element at such a small scale.
There absolutely are physical phenomena that life does not take advantage of.
x-rays aren't a unique physical phenomena, just a wave length of electromagnetic waves, which is a physical phenomena that life makes excessive use of (photosynthesis, vision).
Wow. Link?
But yes, the idea is that if there were a physical principle that would be super useful to animals yet not witnessed in nature, that is something that needs to be explained. There are reasons for evolution to miss a solution.
In the case of quantum computing, I could not really see it: the effects happen at a scale where evolution operates, and could easily be integrated, e.g. in nerve cells to create a workable signal. I thought reasonable to make it an element to feed my skepticism, though not a ultimately strong argument to deny any possibility of quantum computing.
So far as I know there's no general theory of theories which quantifies this, so there's no way to make predictions about the cut-off point for evolutionary invention.
But in a hand-wavy way, evolution's only feedback loop is first-order and binary - mutate and reproduce at a positive replacement rate, or not.
The feedback loop in science is more complex. Instead of being driven by a random search, "mutations" are guided by a creative model. This creates momentum in the model space which isn't available to evolution - which in turn makes it possible to discover more complex and less immediately accessible solutions.
It also makes it possible to build systems whose value is guaranteed, or at least strongly suspected, before resources are diverted to making them physical.
The bottom line is evolution is only ever going to find a small subset of all possible biological configurations, and that space is going to exclude many features that are available to science-driven search.
(Of course you can argue that scientific meta-search was a product of evolution anyway, so the distinction is academic.)
I could point to MRIs and SQUID, but I guess you could claim some animals sense magnetism (for wayfinding or determining north). I don't consider those to be in the same league but then we're back to arguing semantics under your definitions.
The fact remains that physical phenomena exist that evolution did not discover. There are perfectly good reasons for that, but I don't think it is fair to say if nature doesn't use it then it is "questionable".
Of course: you need an extremely cold and clean environment, which is very hard to generate in a cell. And it wouldn't even be that useful for cells anyway.
The exact same reasoning applies to quantum computers.
Arguing that while nature doesn't might not use some technology, it does do something else that relies on the same principle. Who's to draw the line between a technology and a principle? You can say nature has done anything so long as your definitions are uselessly vague.
