Producing Heterochrony

Abstract

The highly orchestrated cascade from which a complex individual is created from a single fertilized cell is perhaps the greatest wonder of Nature. Here is a self-directed process, wherein the building materials, the builders, and the supervisors are all produced and used at the correct time and place, in blatant circumvention of the most basic law of the universe: entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. Obviously, such a process must consist of a very tightly controlled sequence of nested causal processes. Yet the most intriguing aspect is the ease of creativity: the abundance of ways in which this process can be successfully perturbed to produce different, but viable, individuals (and thus evolution, after the winnowing by selection).

Time is the fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.

Jorge Luis Borges