Homeokinetics/Homeodynamics: A Physical Heuristic for Life and Complexity

Abstract

This essay addresses the puzzlement, the missing piece, sensed when attempts are made to build a bridge from the synchronic, informational genotype to the diachronic, dynamic phenotype—a regular mapping that seems to be extraphysical. There is no formal, dynamic foundation for the bridge. Albert Einstein, Max Delbrück, and Erwin Schrödinger all expressed acute awareness of limitations of contemporary physics when considering biology because physics addresses much simpler sysems. As a proposed remedy, a new physical heuristic, homeokinetics, developed by Arthur Iberall and Harry Soodak (and later recast for biology by me as homeodynamics) is introduced here as a foundation for comprehending energy flows and transformations in complex systems, including those in metabolic networks of living systems. Their individual dynamic stability is flexible and marginal—it must allow for adaptations and changes in physiological and behavioral states to occur in an orderly fashion as external circumstances change. At the population level, stability must allow for evolvability of chemical networks that have energized terrestrial living systems for about 3.9 billion years. Homeokinetics/homeodynamics emphasizes that persistent, marginally stable metabolic networks, as open thermodynamic systems, necessarily organize energy processing as cyclic, physical action modes. Conceptually, that organization is under 2 kinds of biological time pressure—time as a cycle that daily closes the thermodynamic books and time as an arrow orthogonally pressing the cyles into the future, creating joint time as a helix. In most animals, after maturity, the helix is additionally shaped into a tapered ellipsoid by a senesence process that gains influence as dynamic degrees of freedom are frozen out by the constructions of development.