"A recent essay in Aeon, “The clock in our genes: The biologist Victoria Foe discovered a timing device in ‘junk’ DNA that could unlock the evolution of complex life,” 24 March 2026, tells the story (and it is well worth reading) of developmental biologist Victoria Foe, whose work presses against one of the most persistent assumptions in modern biology: that DNA is primarily information, a code to be read with lots of “useless stuff” all around it. Foe’s work suggests something far more physical, and far more interesting:
"… the recognition that genes operate within complex regulatory networks did little to dislodge the deeper assumption that biological meaning resides primarily in information coded in DNA sequences. Foe’s work presses against that assumption. Genes are not only messages but material entities embedded in time, subject to interruption, constraint and decay."
Genes are not just messages.
RNA’s are not just messengers.
If a short gene takes five minutes to be copied, its RNA will appear on the scene swiftly and in copious amounts.… A longer gene unit … will be finished only by the very end. If a gene is extra-long, its transcription will be halted midway…. Once the cell has split in two, the clock resets.
In her studies of embryonic development, Foe observed that gene
Gene length, she argues, functions as a molecular clock, regulating when developmental processes occur. As the Aeon essay notes:
"A gene’s length determines its transcription time. This means that a cell’s genes are not just a collection of instructions; they are a collection of timers."
The choreography of life, from cell division to tissue formation, depends not just on what genes say,
but on how long they take to say it.
Transcription is not the transmission of a signal; it is the physical traversing of a distance. Length is duration. In Foe’s world, the cell doesn’t ‘calculate’ time; it ‘endures’ it.
Time is not something the organism observes.
It is something the organism obeys.
And here, a curious tension emerges.
As Jo Marchant recently put it:"Time is elusive in other ways, too. We have no sensory organs for detecting it, nor any dedicated brain areas for tracking it. Our experience of time can vary hugely… we can easily be fooled about how much time has elapsed."
Time is not localized because it is not a signal.
Time is an objective condition.
Reality Check: These arguments miss the point entirely. We do not have a ‘time organ’ for the same reason a fish does not have a ‘wetness organ.’ We don’t sense time as an external arrival; we inhabit it as an internal necessity. To the embryo, time isn’t a ‘bookkeeping device’ – it is the narrow gate through which every protein must pass or perish.
Vision can be assigned to an eye because light arrives. Sound can be assigned to an ear because vibrations propagate. But time does not arrive.
It orders.
Transcription requires duration.
Cell division interrupts processes in a sequence.
Development unfolds in ordered stages that cannot be rearranged without consequence.
Remove time from the world, and biological systems aren’t “misinterpreted.”
They simply fail.
And so we arrive at an unexpected irony.
*While some areas of physics and philosophy suggest that time may be a feature of consciousness,
*biology continues to operate as though time is a real structuring feature of the world, one that organisms must measure, accommodate, and survive within."
CEH
