side effects?

[Steve Johnson <***>]

Judith,

This article reminded me of your recent email about
side effects: we find solutions to our problems which
bring new problems for which we find solutions ad
infinitum.

http://www.cnn.com/2005/TECH/science/07/04/pollution.eating.plant.ap/index.html

On the site of a former hat factory in Danbury,
Connecticut, a stand of genetically altered cottonwood
trees sucks mercury from the contaminated soil.

Across the continent in California, researchers use
transgenic Indian mustard plants to soak up
dangerously high selenium deposits caused by
irrigation of the nation's bread basket.

Still others are engineering trees to retain more
carbon and thus combat global warming.

- Steve


--- Judith Rosen <***> wrote:

> Given some of the discussions, lately, about aspects
> of my father's 
> work, I thought it would be both useful and entirely
> appropriate to 
> post a few passages of his own thoughts on these
> same subjects. The 
> first is from "Life, Itself; A Comprehensive Inquiry
> Into the Nature, 
> Origin, and Fabrication of Life", pages 202/203:
> 
> Robert Rosen wrote:
> ... In chapter 7, I introduced the idea of a
> simulation of a 
> formalism. Roughly speaking, I showed that a
> formalism can be 
> simulated if its inferential structure could be
> expressed as software 
> to a mathematical machine, in particular, as
> program. As I suggested, 
> this places severe restrictions on that inferential
> structure; 
> simulability of a formalism is a strong condition to
> be mandated of 
> it.
> 
> We are now in a position to put these apparently
> unrelated ideas 
> together and see what happens.
> 
> 8B MACHINES AND MECHANISMS
> 
> As we have seen, given a natural system N [here,
> "natural" means 
> actual or real, as opposed to formalisms], we have
> formalisms F 
> associated with it as models, simply by virtue of
> Natural Law itself 
> [meaning that appropriate inferential entailment in
> a model will 
> commute to the corresponding natural system's causal
> entailment and 
> the model will then accurately predict behaviors
> of/in the natural 
> system]. We now also have a condition (simulability)
> that may be 
> mandated of formalisms. Putting the two together
> defines for us a 
> class of natural systems, those whose models, as
> formalisms, satisfy 
> that condition.
> 
> Let us give a name to this class. We shall say that
> a natural system N 
> is a mechanism if and only if all of its models are
> simulable.
> 
> We shall further say that a natural system N is a
> machine if and only 
> if it is a mechanism, such that at least one of its
> models is already 
> a mathematical machine.
> 
> On the face of it, these seem peculiar ways of
> characterizing 
> mechanisms and machines from among the class of
> natural systems. But 
> this peculiarity stems only from my expression of
> these concepts in 
> terms of the models of N, rather than try to talk
> directly about N 
> itself. This is all Natural Law entitles us to do.
> We have so far in 
> this volume nothing that transcends those
> entitlements, and I shall do 
> nothing in what follows that transcends them; on the
> other hand, it is 
> my aim to utilize precisely these entitlements to
> the full extent. It 
> is my main contention, in fact, that contemporary
> science, as a whole, 
> does not do this; by the time we are done, this fact
> and its 
> consequences will be quite apparent."
> 


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