Foresight: Empedocles’ On Nature, P. Strasb. Gr. Inv. 1665–6, a theory of networks and evolutionary growth ~2,400 years before Darwin

The rise of hierarchy and modularity in biological networks explained by Empedocles’ double tale ∼2,400 years before Darwin and systems biology

“…Inv. 1665-6 supports this contention ( Caetano-Anollés and Janko, 2021 ). Remarkably, the double tale also involves a “network” paradigm ( tela vitae ) of systems of interconnected things.…”

“…Figure 1C presents a thematic indexing of the poem, highlighting segments describing the double tale, natural selection, evolving lineages, evolving networks, natural history and systematization, origin of life, accretion, modules, life cycles, and fossil remnants. An indexed translation and commentary can be found in Supplementary Material and in Caetano-Anollés and Janko (2021) .…”

“…For example, the text corresponding to the papyrus fragment ensemble fr. a (illustrated in Figure 1C ) presents crucial principles that are common to modern evolutionary biology, sometimes cryptically evident ( Caetano-Anollés and Janko, 2021 ). Lines 258–260 specify how growing things establish a hierarchy of wholes unified from integrated parts to make up what can be interpreted as lineages: “ For all these things are equal and alike in age but each rules separate domains ”.…”

Recruitment: A Problem of Entangled Temporal Parts

“…Both forces are at play in chronologies of temporal parts such as those of metabolism, proteins, molecular functions, viral change, or the ribosome, making any evolutionary ground plan a directed network. This intuition, which was already recounted in Empedocles' poems of the Strasbourg papyrus [4] and made explicit in the Apollonian and Dionysian forces of Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy [72] (in which order and individuation counteract chaos and dissolution), was recently made part of a theoretical framework of module generation that explains the emergence of hierarchical modularity in evolving networks [73,74]. The framework, which is backed by considerable explanatory evidence, elaborates a linkage-based biphasic (bow-tie) model that predicts both the evolutionary emergence of nested hierarchies of modules and the convergence under optimization or selection of those modules into tightly linked groups, which are then free to diversify and generate a new level of biological organization.…”

“…The origin and omnipresence of recruitment however has not been explained in evolutionary biology, nor has its many philosophical difficulties been analyzed. In fact, the problem of recruitment interfaces with the central problem of maintaining identity through space and time, an issue already known to Presocratic scholars such as Parmenides, Heraclitus and Empedocles more than two millennia ago as exemplified by the poems of the Strasbourg papyrus [4]. We have ad-dressed the problem of recruitment within a framework of a 4-dimensional space-time 'worm' theory of entangled temporal parts [5].…”