Information AboutRobert Rosen |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT ROBERT ROSEN | |
| 1934 births | |
| rosen, robert | |
| 1998 deaths | |
| dalhousie university faculty | |
| systems scientists | |
| rosen | |
| theoretical biologists | |
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Another major theme in the work of Robert Rosen was the clarification of the notion of the scientific Model . In fact, he maintained that modelling be the essence of Science . His book ''Anticipatory Systems'' is mainly concerned with what he termed the Modelling Relationship . In Biology he is known by some for a class of relational cell models called (M,R)-systems that he devised. In these systems he tried to capture the minimal organization a material system would have to manifest to justify calling it a Cell . However, Rosen's work proposes a methodology he terms "relational biology" (a term he borrows from Nicolas Rashevsky ). Rosen’s "relational biology" maintains that organisms have a distinct quality called "organization" not captured by the language of Differential Equation s but using Category Theory (a mathematical theory that deals with abstract structures, although his use of this theory is extremely elementary, employing little more than the definition of category and a few very simple properties of categories). This study, Rosen says, must be independent from which constitutes a living system. He goes very far in this direction claiming that "when studying an organized material system, throw away the notion introduced by Rosen as the behavioral difference between an organism with a "heterogonous state" and one without it). Rosen also rejects some aspects of mainstream interpretations of Biochemistry and Biology . He objects the idea that the functional role of a Protein can be investigated purely using the sequence of Amino Acid s, due to intrinsic syntactic limitations of the habitual language of chemistry (graphs of atoms and molecules). Based on this thesis, Rosen says that is impossible to find either an Algorithm that can calculate the three-dimensional conformation of a protein directly or the active site of it, although he made absolutely no attempt to formalize the problem in such a manner that would be required to prove such a claim. "If phenotype is chemistry, as mandated by the sequence hypotheses", he says, "that ''chemistry'' is not the familiar contemporary chemistry we find in books". In the case of biology, Rosen maintains that "Darwinian Evolution " doesn’t provide any kind of causality or entailment, and without them, "turn evolution, and hence biology, into a collection of pure historical chronicles, like tables of random numbers, or stock exchange quotations". He maintains that the denial of "evolutionary entailments" represents an “excuse itself from science through its absolute denial”. The proposed solution for this problem is embracing entailment in evolution, citing the works of Ernst Haeckel and his idea of “ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny”, René Thom ’s ''Catastrophe Theory'' and D’Arcy Thompson ’s ''On Growth and Form''. Questions about Rosen's arguments were raised in a paper authored by Christopher Landauer and Kirstie L. Bellman which claims that some of the mathematical formulations used by Rosen are problematic. They also claim that the idea that it is possible to establish a correspondence relation between languages and ideal or abstract entities different but related to physical objects has been repudiated in a broad sense from disciplines like Linguistics and Philosophy Of Language . All quotes are from ''Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life''. ''See also:'' Autopoiesis BIBLIOGRAPHY
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