Finslerian Biology

Abstract

In 1746, P.L. de Maupertuis published his “Principle of Least Action” in a precise mathematical form later extended by Euler, Hamilton and Lagrange who, in turn, laid the foundations of classical mechanics as we know it today. Maupertuis believed the principle applicable to biological as well as physical systems and envisaged a specific role for it in studies of motion of animals, in vegetative growth of plants and in physiology. He was not just an armchair biologist, for according to historian Bently Glass, Maupertuis was far ahead of his 18th century biological contemporaries conducting research, both experimental and theoretical, in evolutionary biology one hundred years before Darwin, (Glass, 1959).