Year: 2022

MODULARITY AND SYNCHRONIZATION. “Modularity is clearly seen in periodic processes like circadian rhythms or the cell cycle. These and other processes are temporally regulated through a precise orchestration of transcriptional events and post-translational modifications.” https://lnkd.in/dnbEczB View in LinkedIn

EVOLVABLE ROBUSTNESS. “Higher levels of organization, like populations and species, also exhibit temporal variation. Robustness emerges as an evolvable property, as systems adapt to stress in changing environmental conditions through mutations and genetic drift. These changes span much longer time scales.” https://lnkd.in/dnbEczB View in LinkedIn

SLOPPY SPACE. “The adaptation to perturbation imposes a selection pressure and does not come as a fast response but rather as an evolved phenotypic outcome in a sloppy space.” https://lnkd.in/dnbEczB View in LinkedIn

MESHING SCHEDULES. “Dynamics of biological systems with different time scales. Not only between systems driven by different clocks such as populations versus nerve cells, but importantly also within a single organism which operates on clocks, with several orders of magnitude differences, such as 10(-6) to 10(6).” https://lnkd.in/d-2cRZ5 View in LinkedIn

NESTED HIERARCHIES. “An outstanding question in biology is why life has evolved to be hierarchically organized. From genomes, to cells, tissues, individuals, societies, and eco-systems, evolution generates structures with nested spatial and temporal levels. Typically, with each new structural level comes new functionality—a new feature with positive payoff consequences.” https://lnkd.in/dWu-CBk View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE AT DIFFERENT COMPLEXITIES. “Many biological systems commonly exhibit emergent behaviour. The complex behaviour of flocks of birds, colonies of ants, swarms of bees and schools of fish emerges from the interactions of the constituent parts of the respective systems.” https://lnkd.in/dGuipaX View in LinkedIn

EMERGENCE AT DIFFERENT TIME SCALES. It is possible that since emergence can occur at hierarchically nested series of greater structural complexity, so also with nested series of time scales. View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this walk into the garden of biological time. There is virtually no literature on the subject. As we see biology and physics working together on quantum biology, based on quantum mechanics, at whose heart is time itself, it would be curious to explore the big and small nuances of biological time scales. At the very least, we see our world very differently when we adopt a different time scale. View in LinkedIn

ASSAULTS ON CELLS. "Nature has developed numerous mechanisms to counteract these problems, such as proofreading enzymes, ubiquitous antioxidants and apoptotic death of unfit cells. However, none of these is completely effective." https://lnkd.in/dtrQAMw View in LinkedIn

THE FATE OF ALL SPECIES. "Although individuals accumulate damage, species usually do not become increasingly damaged; however, this could be one of the mechanisms for eventual extinction or evolution to a different species, the apparent fate of essentially all species." http://www.publish.csiro.au/?paper=RD14514 View in LinkedIn