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Robert Rosen
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- See also arts and entertainment celebrity producer-writer-performer: Robert M. Rosen, Robert Ozn
Robert Rosen (27 June, 1934, - 28 December, 1998, Rochester, New York) was an American theoretical biologist and professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.
rt Rosen was born on June 27, 1934 in Brownsville (a section of Brooklyn), in New York City. He studied biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and history-- especially the history of science-- and eventually became a student of physicist and theoretical biologist Nicholas Rashevsky.
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- See also arts and entertainment celebrity producer-writer-performer: Robert M. Rosen, Robert Ozn
Robert Rosen (27 June, 1934, - 28 December, 1998, Rochester, New York) was an American theoretical biologist and professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.
Biography
Robert Rosen was born on June 27, 1934 in Brownsville (a section of Brooklyn), in New York City. He studied biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and history-- especially the history of science-- and eventually became a student of physicist and theoretical biologist Nicholas Rashevsky. He received his PhD in Relational Biology from the University of Chicago in 1959 and remained there until 1964.
In 1964 Rosen was offered a full professorship with tenure at the University of Buffalo, now known as the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo, holding a joint appointment at the Center for Theoretical Biology. In 1970, he took a sabbatical and spent a year as a Visiting Fellow at Robert Hutchins' Center For the Study of Democratic Institutions, in Santa Barbara, California. It was a seminal year for him, leading to the conception and development of what he later called Anticipatory Systems Theory, a corollary of his larger theoretical work on relational complexity, in which it is embedded. In 1975, he left Buffalo and accepted a position at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a Killam Research Professor in the Department of Physiology & Biophysics, where he remained until he took early retirement in 1994.
He was president of the Society for General Systems Research, (now the ISSS), in 1980-81.
Work
Rosen's research was concerned with the most fundamental aspects of biology, specifically the question "What is life?" or "Why are living organisms alive?". Major themes in the work of Robert Rosen were:
- developing a specific definition of complexity that is based on relations and, by extension, principles of organization
- developing a rigorous theoretical foundation for living organisms as "anticipatory systems"
Rosen came to realize that the contemporary model of physics - which is still based on the Cartesian/Newtonian world of mechanisms - was inadequate to explain or describe the behavior of biological systems; that is, one could not properly answer the question "what is life?" from within a scientific foundation that is entirely reductionistic. Approaching organisms with reductionistic scientific methods and practices always sacrifices the whole in order to study the parts, but what Rosen discovered was that the whole could not be recaptured once the organization had been destroyed. His conclusion was that the very thing about living organisms biologists should be studying, the organization, was the first aspect of all biological systems to be thrown away in scientific analysis. This is a limitation of contemporary science when science regards the machine as a model for all systems in the universe. Rosen came to regard the machine metaphor as the single biggest impediment to scientific exploration of questions in biology and concluded that the paradigm needs to be expanded beyond purely reductionist capabilities. In order to do this properly, he said there must be a sound theoretical foundation underlying the expansion and that relational complexity provided such a foundation. So it was that, rather than biology being a mere subset of already-known physics, it turned out that biology had profound lessons for physics, and science in general..
Notion of the scientific model
The clarification of the notion of the scientific model: Rosen maintained that modeling is the essence of science and of thought. His book Anticipatory Systems describes, in detail, what he termed the modeling relation. He showed the deep differences between a true modeling relation and a simulation, which is not based on such a relation. In biology he is known by some for a class of relational models called "(M,R)-Systems" that he devised, which he said capture the minimal capabilities a material system would have to manifest to justify calling it a "alive". In this class of system, M stands for metabolism and R stands for Repair. Thus, his mode for determining life or defining life in any given system is a functional one, not a material one.
Relational biology
Rosen's work proposes a methodology he calls "relational analysis" which needs to be developed in addition to the current capability of reductionistic science. ("Relational" is a term he attributes to Nicholas Rashevsky.) Rosen’s "relational biology" maintains that organisms, indeed all systems, have a distinct quality called "organization" not captured by the language of reductionism. It has to do with more than purely structural or material aspects. For example, organization includes all relations between material parts, relations between the effects of interactions of the material parts, and relations with time and environment, to name a few. Many people sum up this aspect of complex systems by saying that "The whole is more than the sum of the parts". Relations between parts and between the effects of interactions must be considered as additional parts, in some sense. Organization, Rosen says, must be independent from the material particles which seemingly constitute a living system. As he put it: "The human body completely changes the matter it is made of roughly every 8 weeks, through metabolism and repair. Yet, you're still you-- with all your memories, your personality... If science insists on chasing the particles, they will follow them right through an organism and miss the organism entirely," (as told to his daughter, Judith Rosen).
He goes very far in this direction claiming that when studying a complex system, we can "throw away the matter and study the organization" to learn essential things about an entire class of systems, in general. He supports this claim (actually it is a quote which he also attributes to Rashevsky) based on the fact that living organisms are a class of systems with an extremely wide range of material "ingredients", different structures, different habitats, different modes of living and reproducing, and yet we are somehow able to recognize them all as "living". In contrast, a study of the specific material details of any given organism, or even of a whole species, will only tell us about how that type of organism "does it". Such a study doesn't approach what is common to all living organisms, i.e.; life. Relational approaches in biology allow us to study organisms in ways that preserve the qualities we are trying to learn about.
Biochemistry and Genetics
Rosen also questioned many aspects of mainstream interpretations of biochemistry and genetics. He objects to the idea that functional aspects in biological systems can be investigated via a material focus. One example: Rosen disputes that the functional capability of a biologically active protein can be investigated purely using the genetically encoded sequence of amino acids. This is because, he said, a protein must undergo a process of "folding" to attain its characteristic three-dimensional shape before it can become functionally active in the system. Yet, only the amino acid sequence is genetically coded. The mechanisms by which proteins fold are not completely known. He concluded, based on examples such as this, that phenotype cannot always be directly attributed to genotype and that the chemically active aspect of a biologically active protein relies on more than the sequence of amino acids, from which it was constructed: There must be other factors at work.
Questions about Rosen's arguments were raised in a paper authored by Christopher Landauer and Kirstie L. Bellman which claims that some of the mathematical formulations used by Rosen are problematic. (Note, by Judith Rosen, who owns the copyrights to her father's books: Some of the confusion is due to known errata introduced into the book, "Life, Itself," by the publisher. For example, the diagram that refers to "(M,R)-Systems" has more than one error; errors which do not exist in Rosen's manuscript for the book. These errata were made known to Columbia University Press when the company switched from hardcover to paperback version of the book (in 2006) but the errors were not corrected and remain in the paperback version as well. The book "Anticipatory Systems; Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodological Foundations" has the same diagram, correctly represented.)
See also
Publications
Rosen has written several books and articles. A selection:
- 1970, Dynamical Systems Theory in Biology New York: Wiley Interscience.
- 1970, Optimality Principles, Rosen Enterprises
- 1978, Fundamentals of Measurement and Representation of Natural Systems, Elsevier Science Ltd,
- 1985, Anticipatory Systems: Philosophical, Mathematical and Methodological Foundations. Pergamon Press.
- 1991, Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life, Columbia University Press
Published posthumously:
- 2000, Essays on Life Itself, Columbia University Press.
- 2003, "Anticipatory Systems; Philosophical, Mathematical, and Methodolical Foundations", Rosen Enterprises
- 2003, Rosennean Complexity, Rosen Enterprises.
- 2003, The Limits of the Limits Of Science, Rosen Enterprises
External links
- Judith Rosen's website providing biographical information, discussion of, and reprints of the work of Robert Rosen.
- Autobiographical Reminiscences of Robert Rosen; about his educational background, his philosophy of science, and his general point of view.
- A website exploring the work of Rosen.
- by Aloisius Louie.
- An essay by Donald C. Mikulecky.
- by Christopher Landauer and Kirstie L. Bellman criticising some of Rosen's mathematical formulations, followed by attempts to improve the formulations.
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