Biological proper time and entropy-cost invariance in cardiac and respiratory lifespan scaling

Abstract

Warm-blooded vertebrates accumulate approximately conserved numbers of physiological cycles over a natural lifetime: of order $10^9$ heartbeats and $10^8$--$3\times10^8$ breaths. These regularities are not exact constants, but their persistence across orders-of-magnitude variation in body mass, metabolic power, physiological frequency, and lifespan suggests that biological time is not measured by chronological duration alone. We develop the Principle of Biological Time Equivalence (PBTE), a thermodynamic framework in which lifetime cycle count is determined by the ratio between total lifetime entropy production and the entropy cost of one physiological cycle. Starting from the open-system entropy balance $\dot S=\dot e_p-\dot h_d$, we define the entropy cost per cycle as $σ_0=dΣ/dN$, where $dΣ$ is the entropy produced as the physiological clock advances by $dN$ cycles. For an adult homeostatic regime, this gives the cycle-count relation $N_\star=Σ/\langleσ_0\rangle$, with $Σ=\int_0^L \dot e_p(t)\,dt$, where $N_\star$ is the lifetime cycle count, $Σ$ is total lifetime entropy production, and $\langleσ_0\rangle$ is the lifetime-averaged entropy cost per cycle. In the homeostatic limit, $\dot e_p\simeq P/T$, so direct measurement of metabolic power $P$, body temperature $T$, and physiological frequency $f$ gives $σ_0\simeq P/(Tf)$. PBTE converts the empirical lifetime-cycle invariants into entropy-cost invariants. Under Kleiber metabolic scaling and quarter-power physiological-frequency scaling, the mass-specific entropy cost satisfies $\barσ_0=P/(TfM)\propto M^{3/4+1/4-1}=M^0$, providing a thermodynamic interpretation of allometric mass cancellation.