Panmere

Aloisius Louie has written a new paper for the journal Axiomathes, entitled "Functional Entailment and Immanent Causation in Relational Biology" [1].  The abstract:
I explicate the crucial role played by efficient cause in Robert Rosen’s characterization of life, by elaborating on the topic of Aristotelian causality, and exploring the many alternate descriptions of causal and inferential […]

From ScienceNOW Daily News, this story, entitled “Pavlov’s Bacteria?”[1]:

Researchers already know that microbes can mount simple responses to changes in their environment, such as acidity fluctuations, by altering their internal workings. If the changes are regular enough, bacteria can respond ahead of time. But systems biologist Saeed Tavazoie of Princeton University wondered if microbes were […]

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 […]

A 2006 paper attempting to criticize some of Rosen’s arguments, entitled “In Defense of Mechanism” by A.J. Wells [1], was recently brought to my attention. The paper makes a lengthy series of erroneous arguments based on misinterpretations of Rosen’s arguments. Wells begins with a list of statements drawn from Rosen’s Life Itself [2]. He then […]

From ScienceDaily:

ScienceDaily (Dec. 5, 2007) - Life may have begun in the protected spaces inside of layers of the mineral mica, in ancient oceans, according to a new hypothesis.
The hypothesis was developed by Helen Hansma, a research scientist with the University of California, Santa Barbara and a program director at the National Science Foundation. 
The Hansma […]

A paper by Aloisius Louie and Stephen Kercel, entitled “Topology and Life Redux: Robert Rosen’s Relational Diagrams of Living Systems”[1], has been published in the latest issue of the journal Axiomathes. The abstract:

Algebraic/topological descriptions of living processes are indispensable to the understanding of both biological and cognitive functions. This paper presents a fundamental algebraic description of […]