Re: Life without evolution/evolution without life?

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Hi Howard,

Anticipatory Systems was written while Dad was IN Halifax, although the idea
that it is based on came to him in Santa Barbara, the year that he was
involved with Robert Hutchins' "Center For The Study Of Democratic
Institutions".

Is it shocking to say that life has to exist first before life can evolve
into multiple levels/creatures/ecosystems? Or that it is possible to learn
about life in the organismal sense, without knowing anything about how
certain organisms evolved into what they are today? Learning about complex,
living, anticipatory systems may tell us a lot about evolution of species,
but theories of how evolution happened/happens don't do much to explain how
life "works", why it exists, what causes it, etc.

I suppose I should define my terms! Evolution, the way my father used it,
refers to the adaptive changes in living systems over very long periods of
time. The word, however, is often used elsewhere to refer to all kinds of
things, including car design and fashion.

Judith




Howard Pattee wrote:
Note however, that this quote is from Rosen's pre-Halifax era when he was
still engaged with colleagues and students. As Judith pointed out by her
quote, evolution is an essential concept in Anticipatory Systems. But there
is a total change of view in Life Itself:

[Rosen, LI, p. 255] "Ever more insistently over the past century, and never
more so than today, we hear the argument that biology is evolution; that
living things instantiate evolutionary processes rather than life; and
ironically, that these processes are devoid of entailment, immune to
natural law, and hence outside science completely. To me it is easy to
conceive of life, and hence biology, without evolution. But not of
evolution without life. Thus it is that the word "evolution" has hardly
been mentioned in the preceding pages."

Howard