My talk will first of all deal with power laws in present day biological systems which thus represent a “static” picture, a photograph/image of present day biological systems, after evolution has done its work. This is real science. It is exemplified by the original work of Kleiber (1932) who plotted the basal metabolic rate of mammals and birds against mass. Recent studies by Geoffrey West and James Brown of the Santa Fe Institute and Los Alamos Laboratory have much extended this type of work to many biological systems.

I will then go from the static biological picture to time-dependent phenomena by introducing scaling laws in evolutionary contexts. The ones I have chosen, although based on science, are permeated with the more metaphysical concept of the acceleration of history. This discussion will be based on the studies of Henry Adams, who essentially introduced the term “acceleration of history” in 1904, Sergei Kapitza, the physicist and polymath, who studied human population growth, and extended his study to large-scale historical events (1996), and Graeme Snooks (Australian social scientist, 2005) who is concerned with scaling law expressions involving mass extinction episodes in the history of evolution, as is A.D.Panov (Russian nuclear physicist, 2005) who extends the study to human and historical evolution as well as to the prebiological era.

Many of the premises in these studies are debatable and some, such as those leading to evaluations concerning the origin of life, are frankly on the borderline of science fiction. Nevertheless, I offer these studies to you as likely to arouse reflection, discussion and debate on a host of fascinating subjects.