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Comment by johndoe42377 | Hacker News Reader

This is a conceptual mess.

Synchronization does not imply time. It implies synchrony, which is a mechanical notion. Electric signals are used everywhere in life for that purpose.

What they called clocks are not clocks. No more than a frequency generator is a clock.

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To an electronic engineer a frequency generator in fact is a clock.

A frequency generator is the essence of a clock. Why do you think we talk about clock speed in computer science? I'm honestly not sure what other definition you would even use in this context. And certainly, given that these "frequency generators" synchronize, divide time into repeating windows of roughly the same length, and are used to schedule and regulate biological processes, it is a bit bizarre for you to say that they somehow have nothing to do with timing.

What are you on dude? In what universe does synchronization not involve time? Synchronization is defined as "Occur at the same time or rate".

Even if you're so pedantic that you're going to say something like "it could mean rate and not time". Rate also means "the number occurrences in a specific time interval". So how exactly are you contorting your logic to come to this conclusion?

Not saying I agree with GP but there are 2 distinct notions of time. One is related to durations, and the other is absolute time (aka wall time). Clocks measure wall time, not durations. Cellular processes probably don’t care about wall time.

Wall clock time is pretty much only measured in practice as some offset relative to some repeating process, though (e.g. hours since start of day). Cells certainly have processes that repeat on a daily basis, at different offsets from the beginning of the day; they may not actually be measured by counting ticks (the jury's still out on exactly how they do it, I think?), but the effect is similar.

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