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Hi Folks,
I thought the list would be interested in this excerpt of my father's so
I'm posting it here, as well. Wherever I have inserted comments or changes, they
are encased in brackets [ ]. They number very few.
Cheers,
Judith
Dr. Robert Rosen (taken from Page 271, Essays on Life,
Itself):
"The chapters in this part [of the book] are of a different
character from those preceding. They bear not so much on what we can learn about
biology from other disciplines as on what we can learn about other disciplines
from an understanding of biological modes of organization. Most particularly,
they bear on technologies-- how to solve problems. Hence I shall use
"technology" in the broadest sense, to include problems of an environmental and
social nature, not just the fabrication of better mechanical devices, and to
connote the execution of functions.
I have long believed, and argued, that biology provides us with a
vast encyclopedia about how to solve complex problems, and also about how not to
solve them. Indeed, biological evolution is nothing if not this, but its method
of solution (natural selection) is, by human standards, profligate, wasteful,
and cruel. Nevertheless, the solutions themselves are of the greatest elegance
and beauty, utterly opposite to the discordances and moral conflicts that
created them. We cannot use Nature's methods, but we can (and, I believe, must)
use Nature's solutions.
I have also long believed that there are many deep homologies
between social modes of organization and biological ones that make it possible
to learn deep things about each by studying the other. I believe the situation
here is vary much akin to the Hamiltonian mechano-optical analogy that I touched
on in chapter 14, an analogy that enabled us to learn new and profound things
about optics while studying mechanics, and vice versa (while having nothing to
do with reducing the one to the other). The thread that weaves such disparate
subjects together is rather of a mathematical character; a congruence between
their distinct entailment modes-- common models that are diversely realized. In
this case, the models are relational, and they are complex.
The common relational models that bridge biology and the
technologies allow us, in principle, to separate the fruits of selection without
needing to emulate its methods. They provide a Rosetta stone that allows us to
utilize the billions of years of biological experience contained in Nature's
encyclopedia, and to realize them in our own ways, applied to our own
problems.
These matters were all resolutely, although with great reluctance,
excluded from "Life, Itself". However, they played an integral role in the
development of the lines of argument detailed therein. For instance, the idea of
(biological) function developed [in that volume] (in which a subsystem
is described in terms of what it entails, rather than exclusively in terms of
what entails it) has an indelible technological slant, which I exploit as a
point of departure in the chapters of this part. I make many uses of this
notion, even though it is dismissed by reductionistic biology as merely a vulgar
anthropomorphism. [Not too politically correct, there, sorry!-- J.R.] It should
be noted that this concept of function exists even in contemporary mechanical
physics; it is closely related to the distinction between inertial and
gravitational aspects of matter described in part 1 (see specifically chapter
1).
A metaphor I use to motivate the study of this biological
encyclopedia in technological contexts is that of the chimera. In biology, this
term connotes a single organism possessing more than the usual number of
parents-- e.g., whose cells arise from genetically diverse sources. [It is also
a common mythical beast, having the body parts of several different animals,
such as a horse with wings, a sphinx, a centaur, etc.] The chimera is in fact a
point of departure from biology into technological considerations, and this
in many ways. Our civilization has become replete with man-machine chimeras, and
even machine-machine chimeras, which manifest emergent functions their
constituents do not possess. Social structures, and even ecosystems, are
chimerical in this sense. Even such things as activated complexes in
biochemistry can be regarded as chimeras. Yet they have been little studied,
being looked upon in biology as mere curiosities.
[The example in biology that my father used often was that of a
hermit crab, which utilizes an empty shell it finds to provide several functions
that it is not well equipped to handle on its own. The shell serves a function
and its use is a technological act. Very few people know what a hermit crab
looks like without an adopted shell even though these animals are now common
pets and can be found in the average pet store-- cheap. The shell is "a part of"
the crab, even though it is not part of the crab's genotype...]
However, the mysterious interplay between genotype and phenotype is
deeply probed by chimera. And the notion of function is central. One aspect is
that the interplay of function in chimeras is an inherently cooperative notion,
not a competitive one. Indeed, one of the deepest lessons of biology is that
such a cooperation is selected for; indeed, that life would be impossible
without it [as in plants producing what animals need and vice versa.]; and hence
that complex organizational problems can be solved via cooperation and not by
power and competition.
Actually, this is an old idea of mine. In 1975, I was invited to
participate in a meeting entitled Adaptive Economics, despite my protests that I
knew nothing about economics. Clearly, the organizers were of the opinion that
adaptive is universally good, a word impossible to use pejoratively, and what
was wrong with our economic system was, in some sense, its failure to be
sufficiently adaptive. Equally clearly, they wanted me only to provide some
biological examples of adaptation, to lend indirect support to this view. I
thought I could easily provide a catalog of such, and set out to write a paper
in this vein. However, I ultimately found myself writing something quite
different. The lesson of biology turned out to be that adaptiveness is not
universally good; too much of it, in the wrong places, will tear cooperative
structures apart. Indeed, it turns out that organism physiology is very careful
in its apportionment of adaptivity; survival depends on it. This is perhaps not
the lesson the organizers wanted me to deliver from biology, but it is the one
that biology itself wanted-- one small excerpt from its encyclopedia. (Although
not explicitly developed on that paper, there are close ties to my development
of model-based anticipatory controls, which were proceeding concurrently at that
time.)
Another thread in all these works is my warning about the side
effects that arise inevitably when attempts are made to control a complex system
with simple controls. These side effects generically cascade into a devastating
infinite regress. Biology, seen in this light, consists of illustrations of how
such cascading side effects can be forestalled or avoided; the result is,
inevitably, a system with relational properties very like my (M,R)-systems.
Specifically, there must be a characteristic backward loop, relating a "next
stage" in such a cascade with earlier stages-- a future with a past. This, it
should be noted, is the hallmark of impredicativity-- one of the characteristics
of a complex system, and one of the main pillars on which Life, Itself is
built.
The idea of function is resisted in orthodox biology because it
seems to carry with it a notion of design, and it seems necessary to expunge
this at any cost. This is because design seems to presuppose a category of final
causation, which in turn is confuted with teleology. Nevertheless, Kant (in his
"Critique of Practical Reasons") was already likening organic life with art, and
the lessons of life with craft. In chapter 20 [of Essays on Life, Itself], which
deals with human technology in terms of art and craft, and with the role of the
biological encyclopedia in furthering these endeavors, many of the individual
threads just reviewed are interwoven into a single framework.
An early attempt to pursue biological correlates of technology, was
pursued under the general (though diffuse and ill-defined) rubric of bionics.
Chapter 19 is a review of the history of this endeavor; it flourished for less
than a brief decade (roughly 1960 to 1970). As we note, all that exists of it
today is the field of artificial intelligence-- and that in a vastly mutated
form based entirely on a concoction of software, very different from what was
initially envisioned. A renewed and concerted effort in this direction, an
effort to truly read the encyclopedia that biology has left for us, is an urgent
national, indeed international, priority, in the face of the burgeoning problems
faced by each of us as individuals, and by all of us as a species. Spending
billions of dollars on a human genome mapping project, while ignoring the
technological correlates of biological organization that bionics tried to
address, is an egregious mistake-- the very kind of mistake that leads organisms
to extinction.
Chapters 21 and 22 deal with an approach to complex systems from
the direction of dynamics. This direction I also reluctantly excluded from Life,
Itself, but it is of great importance, especially when combined with what is
presented therein. What is most interesting is its inherent semantic, or
informational, flavor, expressed in terms of, for example,
activations/inhibitions and agonisms/antagonisms. Here, impredicativities and
unformalizability appear in the guise of non-exactness of differential forms.
And, of course, most differential forms are not exact.
In some ways, I regard the chapters in this part as the main thrust
of this entire volume. I am always asked by experimentalists why I do not
propose explicit experiments for them to perform, and subject my approaches to
verification at their hands. I do not do so because, in my view, the basic
questions of biology are not empirical questions at all, but rather conceptual
ones; I tried to indicate this viewpoint in Life, Itself. But the chapters in
this part, I hope, expound the true empirical correlates of biological theory.
In the realm of art and craft, rather than in a traditional laboratory, will
ample verification be found."
"Essays on Life, Itself", by Robert Rosen. Copyright; Judith Rosen.
Published by Columbia University Press in 1999.
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