Re: Selling Rosen to the University

[Tim Gwinn <***>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: ROSEN Forum [mailto:*** Behalf Of John
> Kineman
> Sent: Friday, January 23, 2004 11:57 AM
> To: ***
> Subject: Re: Selling Rosen to the University
>
---snip---
 On the
> other hand, I am aware that there are some really deep pitfalls -
> political blunders one can make that will set up a destructive backlash.
> I think Rosen had to deal with that political reality and was partly
> embittered by it. We will certainly have such issues to contend with,
> but it is also possible that the context has changed more favorably now,
> with "ecosystem management" becoming the primary government paradigm in
> the last 5 years (taking a system view rather than population, habitat,
> etc.); and with development of complexity thinking in general (varied as
> that is).

Just the other day, I had a short, yet congenial email exchange with a
certain professor emeritus who clearly wanted to dissuade me from a belief
in the ideas of Rosennean complexity by kindly mentioning that Rashevsky's
ideas are "generally regarded" as having led nowhere (as opposed to the
successes of molecular biology, genomics, etc.). The implication being that
Rosen's relational approaches, having had their genesis in Rashevsky's
ideas, were most likely to also lead nowhere.

So, the stigma against Rashevsky that Rosen described in Life Itself seems
alive and well in academia, and it may therefore unfortunately be unwise to
even mention the historical or conceptual roots of Rosennean complexity and
relational biology lest his ideas are similarly stigmatized before they can
be evaluated on their merits.

Regards,
Tim