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Logical Typing and the Notion of Time in Biology

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DNA Information: Laws of Perception

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology ((BRIEFSBIOCHEM))

Abstract

Time is the most enigmatic “property” of our world but it seems that for the ancients, time has not been too much a quagmire. In the Orient time just did not exist—indeed, it is difficult to find any long-running account of the history of India. The same attitude has been observed not only in the old civilizations of the American continent and among the African Bushmen but interestingly also in ancient Greece. It thus appears that the notion of time as a dimension of objective reality distributed uniformly between the equally important past, present, and future is if not an invention, then at least an idiosyncrasy of the Western civilization, with its ingenious mastery of processes, and accordingly, the necessity of vast memorization and planning. However, time in biological systems appears in a guise quite different from that in mathematics or classical physics, where time is essentially transformed into space, enabling an equally efficient movement in both (past and future) directions. The peculiarity of the biological perception of time can be readily explained at the molecular level using a simplified model of the paradigmal lac operon of the bacterium Escherichia coli.

By the use of a clock the time concept becomes objective.

—Albert Einstein

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Notes

  1. 1.

    In principle, the cellular metabolism could also serve the purpose of inscribing biological time. However, the metabolic processes are much more variable in terms of both specificity and pace, but more importantly they are reversible, whereas the process of transcription is not.

  2. 2.

    From this view it may appear surprising that the selfish genes of such remarkably intelligent vehicles as for example, Thomas of Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and Søren Kierkegaard (to mention just a few illustrious ones), firmly denied any chance of propagation to themselves.

  3. 3.

    From this view, the viruses having either DNA or RNA genomes packaged in proteinaceous shells are more akin to inanimate matter, as they acquire behavioral features characteristic of animate matter only after they become part of the cell and hitchhike on its biosynthetic machinery. Notably, whether the viruses evolutionarily preceded the cells, or whether they represent constituents of the genome that escaped from the primordial cells, remains an open question (see e.g. Forterre and Prangishvili 2009).

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  1. School of Engineering and Science, Jacobs University, Bremen, Germany

    Georgi Muskhelishvili

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Muskhelishvili, G. (2015). Logical Typing and the Notion of Time in Biology. In: DNA Information: Laws of Perception. SpringerBriefs in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17425-9_3

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