Temporal parts and biological change

Persistence is an important property of biological systems. Systems persist when their identity is maintained through time. The problem of identity and change unfolding temporally and spatially has been addressed by the endurantist and perdurantist schools of thought. For endurantists, things are wholly present whenever they exist; they are 3-dimensional. For perdurantists, things have temporal parts and persist through both time and space; they are 4-dimensional and atemporal. Inspired by Verlinde's conjecture on the entropic origins of gravity, we here propose a theory of entanglement that explains causal relationships responsible for the increasingly extended and complex temporal parts of biological systems.