Multicellular Systems - Molecular Theory of the Living Cell - page 524

Table 15.5 The network representation of the EvoDevo duality of life in biology in analogy to the
wave/particle duality of light in quantum physics
Devo (development) Evo (evolution)

1. Node Fertilized egg cells Organisms

2. Edge Synchronic interactions ( within the life

span of an individual organism )

Diachronic interactions ( within the life
span of a species )

3. Goal Mature organisms Mature species

Fig. 15.7 The dual dichotomy
of time . That is, dichotomizing
time into physical and biological
times on the one hand and
the biological time into
synchronic and diachronic
times on the other

Physical Time
(Measured with a clock )

Time Synchronic Time

(Within the lifespan of
individual organisms)

Biological Time
(Measured with
organismic
lifespans)

Diachronic Time
(Within the lifespan of
individual species)

The synchronic time is confined within the life span of the organisms of a species
(e.g., days for bacteria and decades for Homo sapiens ) and the diachronic time
extends beyond individual life span and implicates hundreds or more of them,
depending on the nature of the evolving traits under consideration.
Dichotomizing time into physical and biological times as shown in Fig. 15.7
appears reasonable in view of the fact that there are two distinct kinds of irrevers-
ible processes in nature - (1) physical irreversible processes such as diffusion of
gases and radioactive decays of some elements, and (2) biological irreversible
processes including cell division and cell death which have never been observed to
be reversible. Any irreversible processes can be used as a clock to measure time.
One major difference between physical time and biological time is the constancy of
time interval or duration in the former (in non-relativistic frameworks) (Hawking
and Mlodinow 2010) and the flexibility or variability of time interval or duration in
the latter (e.g., the life span or generation time of bacteria is in hours as compared to
that of humans which is in tens of years).
Just as dendrochronology as represented in Fig. 15.5 can be viewed as a
subdiscipline of the EvoDevo duality of life as depicted in Fig. 15.6 , the pattern
of tree rings (combined with the image of landscape symbolizing the probability
space) appears to provide a convenient visual representation of the EvoDevo
duality of life as schematized in Fig. 15.8 .
This so-called Tree-Ring-And-Landscape (TRAL) model of the EvoDevo dual-
ity of life can be applied to either development or evolution separately, not together,
just as wave-measuring and particle-measuring apparatuses cannot be used together
to study the nature of light (Bohr 1933, 1958, Herbert 1987). The TRL model, when