Time: The Biggest Pattern in Natural History Research

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 spacetime 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, mesoevolutionary/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.

Cosmological and phenomenological transitions into how humans conceptualize and experience time

“…Most networks lack any reference to time as measured by a number lineat most, the length of edges and the distance between nodes are indicative of time. As argued in previous work (Gontier 2016), such networks (Figure 3 Phenomenologically, these theories call out for interactionalism, contextualism, historical particularism, pluralism, pragmatism, in/underdetermination, and they engender ideas of free will and contingency (Gould 1989). Knowing that our essence is what we make of it during our existence (Sartre 1946) can be both liberating and depressing, because a single lifetime measured against the vastness of Ricoeur's (1985) cosmological time, or perhaps multiple spacetimes, is rather insignificant.…”

Teleonomy as a problem of self-causation

“…How the four cosmologies understand causality correlates strongly with how they conceptually and diagrammatically understand and depict time (Gontier, 2016(Gontier, , 2018b. Ancient cultures developed cyclic time notions by studying planetary motions and life cycles.…”

“…Time is an important pillar of cosmologies. Cosmologies are worldviews that describe the nature of being by providing theories on matter, space and time (Gontier, 2016). Thinking on matter, space and time are conjoined because, time, in intellectual history, is defined as the movement of matter in space.…”

What are the levels and mechanisms/processes of language evolution?

“…Units and levels can be understood respectively as the parts and wholes that make up hierarchies, and hierarchy theory is the classic means whereby we try and make sense, epistemologically, of the ontological layeredness or complexity of the world (Simon, 1962). How we understand and depict hierarchical complexity has itself been a cultural and scientific learning process, and we can even distinguish the different Western cosmologies from one another by examining how they theorize and depict complexity (Gontier, 2016b).…”

“…Constitutive (Mayr, 1982), embedded (Pattee, 1973) or nested hierarchies (Grene, 1987) that conceptualize how a structural or functional arrangement of parts/units organizes into a new level/whole that demonstrates emergent properties, and visualizations of these hierarchies often take on the form of bifurcating tree diagrams or cycles (Bechtel, 2011), an example is the classic evolutionary hierarchy (Hull, 1981), where genes constitute organisms that constitute species; and 4. Interactional hierarchies that help to conceptualize how units and levels interact within and between different hierarchies, which in scientific practice often relates to the development of network diagrams (Gontier, 2016b), examples include the network diagrams used to depict macroevolutionary change as it occurs through interactions between the units and levels that constitute the genealogical and ecological hierarchy (Tëmkin & Eldredge, 2015), or the networks that today depict sociocultural and linguistic change in both time and space (history and ecology).…”