ABSTRACT
Rhythmic activity, such as bipedal and quadrupedal locomotion, obviously has a neural substrate. It is not clear, however, that a neurally oriented analysis of rhythmic movement will reveal its mechanism. Nor is it clear that the closely related motor-program perspective, with its emphasis on symbol strings, can provide much help in this matter. Arbitrariness plagues both of the orthodox perspectives on rhythmic movement, given their mutual lack of principled constraints. The first chapter sketches a law-based approach to animal movement, intimating how an account of biological phenomena might be fashioned that is methodologically continuous with the physical sciences. It identifies a central claim that natural phenomena at all scales are organized by a common set of (physical) strategies, although each scale may exhibit unique regularities. At their own scale, living systems are open to exchanges of matter and energy, they are self-sustaining and nondeterminate and they are dominated by information more than they are by forces. These characteristics of living things are discussed as factors that shape the regularities defining a physics of animal movement.
