Book review: The Geometry of Biological Time

Winfree’s The Geometry of Biological Time offers a rigorous dynamical framework for understanding how living systems encode and exploit dynamical affordances in space–time. Biological oscillators, excitable media and reaction–diffusion systems are treated as geometrical flows on state manifolds whose low‑entropy attractors and basins define distributional biases over accessible trajectories. These geometric constraints, shaped by morphology, coupling topology and boundary conditions, selectively channel entropy gradients and entropy production into coherent rhythms, waves and patterns. In this view, tissues and organisms embody a geometry-based (...)."

By Cris Micheli


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On Codes, Meaning, and Scientific Boundaries: A Commentary

"This was a fascinating and beautifully produced video. It introduces a wide audience to the idea that life cannot be exhausted by chemistry alone, and that biological systems are structured through rules of correspondence — what Marcello Barbieri calls organic codes. That alone is an important public service.

Still, from a scientific standpoint, the video often moves into terrain that becomes metaphysically seductive but conceptually vaporous. When meaning is placed “before matter,” or when biological codes are conflated with human language and interpretation, we slide toward a kind of neo-vitalism — a direction that some forms of biosemiotics risk if they are not anchored in the empirical program of Code Biology. Barbieri’s insistence is precise: codes are not interpreted by an inner subject; they are implemented by molecular machines that establish stable correspondences between otherwise independent domains. Meaning, in this framework, is a functional outcome of codical processes, not a pre-existing metaphysical substrate. (...)"

By João Carlos Major


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