Re: Metabolic closure in (M,R)-systems

[Athel Cornish-Bowden <***>]

Judith wrote:

> My only real quarrel with the paper is that it states as fact 
> certain things that are merely opinion, with regards to more than 
> just the perceived  deficiencies of Robert Rosen's own development 
> of the "(M,R)-System" model. Among these opinions is the one stating 
> that this model is purely a model of metabolic networks. My father 
> would argue that ...

Well maybe he would (anyone can change their view over the years), 
but we were basing what we said on what he actually did write, not on 
anything he may have said in private conversations. In Bull. Math. 
Biophys. 20, 245 (1958), he wrote:

> Introduction. An important aspect of the activities of an organism 
> for which we would like to account may be summed up in the word 
> "metabolism". Speaking very roughly, the metabolism of an organism 
> may be visualized as a sequence of operations whereby a set of 
> materials drawn from the environment (which we shall term input 
> materials) are transformed into a new set of materials (output 
> materials) which are directly utilized by the organism in some 
> fashion.  The study of this sequence of operations is one of the 
> fundamental problems of biology.

This seems to us to mean that what Robert Rosen meant by an (M,R) 
system and by metabolism is what we meant by them in our paper.

It's probably also worth mentioning that we were aware (and said so) 
that Robert Rosen's work extended over many more domains (the 
modelling relation, the problems of the newtonian paradigm, the need 
for a new epistemology, complexity, etc.) than we touched upon in the 
paper.

athel


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Athel Cornish-Bowden
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