ABSTRACT
Living organisms are nonlinear, complex adaptive systems, autonomous in the sense that their dynamics are self-organized, while they show goal-directed behavior with respect to external conditions. Their dynamic signatures appear largely as near-periodic fluctuations, arising in part out of competing influences. Overall, the system moves away from its optimal operating point in its high-dimensional-phase space, becomes fragile, and the risk of failure increases. This is the central, most general, homeodynamic cause of senescence and it is a generic property of self-organizing systems. So, dynamical analysis of living systems must start with Newton and stay on the road with him until a branch point is reached at which he becomes a poor guide; but much can be learned about biological complexity from that fact. Biological time is sketched as a daily cycle of metabolic action. The laws of standard, terrestrial-scaled mechanics are deterministic, time symmetric, and conservative; whereas life, conspicuously and universally, is not time symmetric, and not thermodynamically conservative.
