Rosennean Complexity and other interests
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I missed the publication of this last month. The abstract [1]:
The major insight in Robert Rosen’s view of a living organism as an (M,R)-system was the realization that an organism must be “closed to efficient causation”, which means that the catalysts needed for its operation must be generated internally. This aspect is not controversial, but […]
Mathematical biologist and former student of Robert Rosen, Aloisius Louie, has written a new book, More Than Life Itself: A Synthetic Continuation in Relational Biology [1], which continues the development of relational biology which began with Nicolas Rashevsky and Robert Rosen. From the two-page book summary:
Biology is a subject concerned with organization of relations.
Life […]
A paper [1] by Athel Cornish-Bowden and María Luz Cárdenas discussing the Rosen (M,R)-system model is in the June 7, 2008 issue of the Journal of Theoretical Biology. The abstract of this paper:
The concept of an (M,R) system with organizational invariance allows one to understand how a system may be able to maintain itself indefinitely […]
From the National Academies Press comes the 2008 “Assessment of the NASA Astrobiology Institute” [1]. The Executive Summary section begins:
Astrobiology is a scientific discipline devoted to the study of life in the universe—its origins, evolution, distribution, and future. It brings together the physical and biological sciences to address some of the most fundamental questions of […]
A recent article in the Journal of Biology, entitled “Small changes, big results: evolution of morphological discontinuity in mammals” [1], discusses how significant phenotypic changes appear to often be the result of variations of gene expression due to regulatory controls, instead of as a direct result of the primary sequence per se of the DNA:
Rather […]
The latest issue (Feb ‘08, 91(2)) of the journal Biosystems contains at least a couple of articles relevant to Rosennean Complexity. The theme of the issue is “Modelling Autonomy”.
Two abstracts in particular caught my eye:
Autonomy and hypersets
Anthony Chemero and Michael T. Turvey
This paper has two primary aims. The first is to provide an introductory discussion […]