ABSTRACT
Biological systems are engaged in a perpetual process of self-maintenance and self-realisation directed by internally-defined criteria of stability and organization. Different criteria are the laws of biological organization, the constraints which govern the process whereby the organism realises itself as a biological system. At the very heart of biology there is the concept of cycle; and biological systems at the level of organization of the virus or the single cell realise themselves by undergoing a cycle whose result is the production of more of the same systems. The complexity of dynamical behaviour that can arise in the epigenetic process has been analysed brilliantly and described by Rene Thom using the concepts of analytical topology. His theory of structural stability shows how instabilities can arise and unfold in a well-defined manner in a dynamical system when the instability is of the type which he classifies as an elementary catastrophe.
