Jack and Cy, along with Edwina Taborsky, developed ideas about the flow of energy and information in ontogeny and speciation — perhaps species bifurcate rapidly, through alterations in a virtual code shared among individuals, instead of slowly through small mutations, as traditionally assumed. At a complexity-themed meeting in 1997 K. Matsuno and S. Salthe described local and global time as a hierarchy where local events become incorporated into a permanent history that then becomes part of the boundary for new events, an idea like M. Polanyi's "irreducible structures."