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.