[Fis] Biological Laws

Bob,

I pretty much agree with your comments, but there is one that is
worth an additional remark:

"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."

You may recall that we once discussed the similarity of your
ascendency equation:

A = TI (Ascendency A = total system throughput T times average mutual
information I)

to Ohm's Law:

V = IR (voltage = current times resistance).

They are not precisely parallel in their meanings, but they are
remarkably coincidental nonetheless. As far as biological "law"
mirroring physical law goes, this is an interesting reflection. As
for an "underlying process," I wish I had a clue, except maybe
selfish genes, which would not necessarily be a process, but instead
a succession of homological replication. Is that a "process"?

Best regards, Richard

����

Bob Ulanowicz wrote on October 26, 2006:

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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Received on Fri Oct 27 02:16:21 2006