Abstract
Living systems (entities) possess the property of maintaining their organization by continual renewal or production of components by themselves. Based on this self-maintenance ability, they reproduce systems of similar organization. This two-fold property forms unique hierarchical organizations, foreign to physical systems. This paper explores how the living world is organized by the two-fold property, where two types of hierarchical organizations, or part–whole relationships, are distinguished: one is synchronic participation in organizing an entity; the other is diachronic. The former implies that the composition of an entity is fixed through time, regardless of organizational patterns, while the latter involves changes in composition to maintain a pattern. Both types of organization are mathematically formalized, and organizational hierarchies of the living world are analyzed in biological space–time. This analysis reveals that biological systems are arrayed in a complex two-dimensional hierarchical matrix of synchronic and diachronic organization.
Acknowledgements
I thank Stanley Salthe for his valuable comments on an earlier version of the paper.