Re: Robert Rosen in La Recherche

[Judith Rosen <***>]

Thanks for posting that, Athel! I am supposedly going to receive a copy of this issue, according to Anne Viratelle, the lady who contacted me fro La Recherche in Paris. I knew that there is a strong interest in Dad's stuff in Portugal, but it's news to me about Spain. Makes me happy though. I'd love to go to both places, someday. Spanish is one of the languages I'm slightly more fluent in (or "slightly less helpless in" if I'm going to be ruthlessly honest). French, on the other hand, is one I need to seriously brush up on before I can read this article. It got through that they were saying something like "according to Rosen, the difference between an organism and a machine is...." Could we prevail on you for a quick translation?

Judith
Web address: http://www.rosen-enterprises.com
BioTheory: An electronic journal of general science based on the Relational (Rosennean) Complexity Paradigm
On Oct 14, 2005, at 5:11 AM, Athel Cornish-Bowden wrote:

> Judith wrote:
>
> > > PS: I think people may be more aware in France, if a recent email I
> > > received is any indication. They wanted a picture of Robert Rosen to
> > > go along with text which was to be part of a big anniversary issue
> > > of some magazine. The story was about the "giants of the life
> > > sciences" and Dad's name was in a list with people like Schrodinger!
> to which I replied:
>
> > I can't easily imagine who could be behind this!
> This is now in the October 2005 issue of La Recherche (No. 390), in an article by Juli Peretó, Jesús Català and Álvaro Moreno entitled "Qu-est-ce que la vie ?" on pp. 36-40. I haven't seen the whole issue of the magazine yet, but one of the authors sent me a copy of the article. They are Spanish, incidentally, not French, so in relation to Judith's point they may be evidence of an interest in Robert Rosen in Spain. Álvaro Moreno has published previously on (M,R) systems [Morán, F., Moreno, A., Minch, E., Montero, F., 1996. Further steps towards a realistic description of the essence of life. In Langton, C. G., Shimohara, K., editors, Artificial Life V, pages 255-263. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts], so we were aware already of his interest in this subject.
>
> Morán et al. (1996), can be constructed from simplified rules representing
>
> It does indeed include a photograph of Robert Rosen in a list where he appears with Gerald Joyce, Francisco Varela and Erwin Schrödinger, under the caption "Ils ont étudié la question" (presumably the question of what is life, though it doesn't say so). They describe Rosen in the following terms: "biologiste théoricien décédé en 1998, fut professeur de biophysique à l'université Dalhousie de Halifax, au Canada. Pour lui, la différence essentielle entre un organisme vivant et une machine tient à la récursivité des processus qui ont cours dans le premier."
>
> In the text, they say "Tout dépend  donc de tout, ce qui constitue un fascinant mystère. Cette circularité, ou récursivité, marquait pour le théoricien de la biologie Robert Rosen, décédé en 1998, la différence essentielle entre une machine et un organisme : dans ce dernier, chaque élément étant causé par un autre élément, le système est causalement clos."
>
> athel
>
>
> -- 
> --
> Athel Cornish-Bowden
> ***
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