Robert Rosen (June 27, 1934 – December 28, 1998) was an American theoretical biologist and Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.
His year-long sabbatical in 1970 as a visiting fellow at Robert Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California was seminal, leading to the conception and development of what he later called Anticipatory Systems Theory, itself a corollary of his larger theoretical work on relational complexity.
In 1975, he left SUNY at Buffalo and accepted a position at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a Killam Research Professor in the Department of Physiology and Biophysics, where he remained until he took early retirement in 1994.
Rosen's research was concerned with the most fundamental aspects of biology, specifically the questions "What is life?"
A few of the major themes in his work were: Rosen believed that the contemporary model of physics - which he showed to be based on a Cartesian and Newtonian formalism suitable for describing a world of mechanisms - was inadequate to explain or describe the behavior of biological systems.
[4] Rosen's work combines sophisticated mathematics with potentially radical new views on the nature of living systems and science.
"[5] Drawing on set theory, his work has also been considered controversial, raising concerns that some of the mathematical methods he used could lack adequate proof.
Rosen's work proposed a methodology which needs to be developed in addition to the current reductionistic approaches to science by molecular biologists.
As he put it: The human body completely changes the matter it is made of roughly every 8 weeks, through metabolism, replication and repair.
systems are "closed to efficient cause",[10] or in simple terms the catalysts ("efficient causes" of metabolism, usually identified as enzymes) are themselves products of metabolism, and thus may not be considered, in a strict mathematical sense, as subcategories of the category of sequential machines or automata: in direct contradiction of the French philosopher Descartes' supposition that all animals are only elaborate machines or mechanisms.
The mechanistic view prevails even today in most of general biology, and most of science, although some claim no longer in sociology and psychology where reductionist approaches have failed and fallen out of favour since the early 1970s.
However those fields have yet to reach consensus on what the new view should be, as is also the case in most other disciplines, which struggle to retain various aspects of "the machine metaphor" for living and complex systems.
The clarification of the distinction between simple and complex scientific models became in later years a major goal of Rosen's published reports.
This has been, however, taken too literally by a few of his former students who have not completely assimilated Robert Rosen's injunction of the need for a theory of dynamic realizations of such abstract components in specific molecular form in order to close the modeling loop [clarification needed] for the simplest functional organisms (such as, for example, single-cell algae or microorganisms).
His approach, just like Rashevsky's latest theories of organismic sets,[14][15] emphasizes biological organization over molecular structure in an attempt to bypass the structure-functionality relationships that are important to all experimental biologists, including physiologists.
One example: Rosen disputes that the functional capability of a biologically active protein can be investigated purely using the genetically encoded sequence of amino acids.
This is because, he said, a protein must undergo a process of folding to attain its characteristic three-dimensional shape before it can become functionally active in the system.
He concluded, based on examples such as this, that phenotype cannot always be directly attributed to genotype and that the chemically active aspect of a biologically active protein relies on more than the sequence of amino acids, from which it was constructed: there must be some other important factors at work, that he did not however attempt to specify or pin down.
It is perhaps worth noting, however, that such issues were also raised long time ago by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead in their famous Principia Mathematica in relation to antinomies of set theory.
However, these issues have now been addressed by Robert Rosen in his recent book Essays on Life Itself, published posthumously in 2000.
-systems that avoid set theory paradoxes are based on William Lawvere's categorical approach and its extensions to higher-dimensional algebra.
[19][20][21][22] One of his main results, as explained in his book Life Itself (1991), was the unexpected conclusion that (M,R) systems cannot be simulated by Turing machines.
[23] (M,R) systems constitute just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton[24] of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster,[25][26] [27] autopoiesis (or self-building)[28] of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and the autocatalytic sets[29] of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson.
[31] but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any reference in their principal publications to any of the other theories.
[36] Gill and Forterre expressed the essential point as follows:[37] LUCA should not be confused with the first cell, but was the product of a long period of evolution.