Nothing that has physically happened on Earth in real life, such as proteins folding inside a cell, or the evolution of new enzymes, or hominid brains solving problems, or whatever, can have been NP-hard. Period. It could be a physical event that you choose to regard as a P-approximation to a theoretical problem whose optimal solution would be NP-hard, but so what, that wouldn't have anything to do with what physically happened. It would take unknown, exotic physics to have anything NP-hard physically happen. Anything that could not plausibly have involved black holes rotating at half the speed of light to produce closed timelike curves, or whatever, cannot have plausibly involved NP-hard problems. NP-hard = "did not physically happen". "Physically happened" = not NP-hard.