Quote of the Week
(May 26, 2025)

What we’re gaining from all this research [into circadian rhythms] is a wonderful portrait of the organism as a rhythmic being. Investigators have not found controlling mechanisms that single-handedly establish or govern the circadian rhythms of the organism, but rather are discovering how those rhythms come to expression at every level and in every precinct of the organism — perhaps more centrally here and more peripherally there, but altogether in a single, organism-wide harmony that is also linked to environmental rhythms. There is no sensible way, as a scientist, to speak of particular mechanisms that explain this harmony. Instead, every isolated “mechanism” is found to be a reflection of the harmony, and we thereby gain further, detailed understanding of how the whole organism functions as a being in time.

Is any of this a surprise? Should we expect, say, that a “master regulator” of digestion exists? Would it be the stomach? The small intestine? The large intestine? The pancreas? The liver and gall bladder? The metabolism taking place in every cell? The brain that sends various coordinating nervous signals to different organs? The mouth that initiates everything? We would certainly look more to the stomach than, say, to the heart, but the fact remains that the organism as a whole is the closest thing we have to a “master regulator.” What we see in the separate, “mechanistic” clocks and regulators of circadian rhythms is simply the functioning of those rhythms in the most recognizable or most focal places. But they merely put on more obvious display the rhythmic functioning of the entire body.

(from Chapter 9, “A Mess of Causes”, in Organisms and Their Evolution — Agency and Meaning in the Drama of Life)

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