An article in the online magazine Mother Nature Network about biological clocks quoted Jonathan Arnold, a professor of genetics in the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences.
“It’s a fundamental adaptation that helps organisms anticipate the daily light-dark cycle on the planet,” he said. “The clock is a fairly complicated timepiece inside each of us. In order to understand how it works, we started with an organism that is very simple, (one that) doesn’t have as many gears to worry about.”