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Time: The Biggest Pattern in Natural History Research

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Abstract

We distinguish between four cosmological transitions in the history of Western intellectual thought, and focus on how these cosmologies differentially define matter, space and time. We demonstrate that how time is conceptualized significantly impacts a cosmology’s notion on causality, and hone in on how time is conceptualized differentially in modern physics and evolutionary biology. The former conflates time with space into a single space–time continuum and focuses instead on the movement of matter, while the evolutionary sciences have a tradition to understand time as a given when they cartography how organisms change across generations over or in time, thereby proving the phenomenon of evolution. The gap becomes more fundamental when we take into account that phenomena studied by chrono-biologists demonstrate that numerous organisms, including humans, have evolved a “sense” of time. And micro-evolutionary/genetic, meso-evolutionary/developmental and macro-evolutionary phenomena including speciation and extinction not only occur by different evolutionary modes and at different rates, they are also timely phenomena that follow different periodicities. This article focusses on delineating the problem by finding its historical roots. We conclude that though time might be an obsolete concept for the physical sciences, it is crucial for the evolutionary sciences where evolution is defined as the change that biological individuals undergo in/over or through time.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the Portuguese Fund for Science and Technology (Grant ID SFRH/BPD/89195/2012 and Project ID UID/FIL/00678/2013). Cordial thanks also go out to Michael Bradie, Francesco Ferretti, Bendedikt Hallgrímsson, Henrique Leitão, Kate Maschmeyer, Eric Schliesser and Chris Sinha.

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  1. Applied Evolutionary Epistemology Lab, Centre for Philosophy of Science, University of Lisbon, Lisbon, Portugal

    Nathalie Gontier

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Gontier, N. Time: The Biggest Pattern in Natural History Research. Evol Biol 43, 604–637 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11692-016-9394-3

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