Re: Robert Rosen in La Recherche

[Athel Cornish-Bowden <***>]

> 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.

After all those years living in Canada! (Didn't you read the text on 
the back of cereal packets? though come to think of it cereal packets 
don't usually have much to say about (M,R) systems).

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?
OK. (Incidentally the words "Morán et al. (1996), can be constructed 
from simplified rules representing" in my earlier message shouldn't 
be there: I pasted more than I intended, and didn't notice until the 
message was circulated).

For the potted biography, it says: "theoretical biologist who died in 
1998, he was Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University in 
Halifax, Canada. For him the essential difference between a living 
organism and a machine derives from the recursive nature of the 
processes that take place in the former."

In the text, it says: "Everything depends on everything else, which 
constitutes a fascinating mystery. This circularity, or 
recursiveness, represented for the theoritician of biology Robert 
Rosen, who died in 1998,  the essential difference between a machine 
and an organism: in the latter, each elemented being caused by 
another element, the system is closed to causation."

Incidentally, the article says it was translated by Gilles Beron, so 
the original was not in French: presumably Spanish or English 
(conceivably Catalan, Juli Peretó's preferred language, but unlikely, 
as I don't suppose that Álvaro Moreno knows much Catalan). Anyway, 
I've asked Juli if he can forward me the original text, and if he 
does I'll ask his permission to circulate it further.

They don't make any direct reference to Rosen's writing, and appear 
to have got much of their knowledge (or maybe you will say their 
misconceptions) from something that we published in Biology of the 
Cell 96, 713-717 (2004) -- Abstract at 
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/biolcell.htm, complete PDF file at 
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/biolcell.pdf. Doubtless you won't be 
pleased to know this, but you'll know anyway when you see the 
article, so I may as well tell you now.

athel
--
--
Athel Cornish-Bowden
***
http://bip.cnrs-mrs.fr/bip10/homepage.htm