RE: [Fis] Biological Laws

On Thu, 26 Oct 2006, Richard Emery wrote:

> To Guy and Bob (Hi, Bob!):

Hiya Rich! Good to make contact again!

> Just off hand, I can think of three biological "laws" worth
> mentioning here:

Well taken. The imnportant qualifier to Elsasser's treatment is "in the same
sense as the laws of physics." That is, they depend on the continuum
nature of time-space. That doesn't seem to apply to the laws that you
suggest.

> 1. Cope's Law�"Structurally ordained biases of speciation away from a
> lower size limit occupied by founding members of the clade, rather than
> adaptive anagenesis towards organismal benefits of large size" (Gould,
> 2002), which is to say that a clade's body size will increase naturally
> with increasing speciation activity. This "law" might be construed as
> equivalent to the Second Law, wherein entropy must increase with more
> thermodynamic activity. In my own (perverse) imagination, I might even
> say that Cope's Law could be equivalent to Bob U's "ascendency
> hypothesis," referring to flow bits of carbon (information) in
> ecological networks (Bob, am I off the mark here?).

I think it pertains to the increase of "overhead" (dissipative overhead,
to be precise.)

Of course, I could have included my principle of increasing ascendency as
a putative law, but I don't see it as a law per-se. I see it as derivative
of a process -- the autocatalytic process to be precise.

I suspect the same might apply to the "laws" you cite. It's just that I'm
not a good enough biologist to put my finger on the underlying processes.

The best,
Bob

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Robert E. Ulanowicz | Tel: (410) 326-7266
Chesapeake Biological Laboratory | FAX: (410) 326-7378
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Received on Thu Oct 26 22:27:46 2006