Robert Rosen (biologist)
Robert Rosen was an American theoretical biologist and Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.
Career
Rosen was born on June 27, 1934, in Brownsville, in New York City. He studied biology, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and history; particularly, the history of science. In 1959 he obtained a PhD in relational biology, a specialization within the broader field of Mathematical Biology, under the guidance of Professor Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago. He remained at the University of Chicago until 1964, later moving to the University of Buffalo — now part of the State University of New York — at Buffalo on a full associate professorship, while holding a joint appointment at the Center for Theoretical Biology.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. He is survived by his wife, a daughter, Judith Rosen, and two sons.
He served as president of the Society for General Systems Research, now known as the International Society for the Systems Sciences, in 1980-81.
Research
Rosen's research was concerned with the most fundamental aspects of biology, specifically the questions "What is life?" and "Why are living organisms alive?". A few of the major themes in his work were:- developing a specific definition of complexity based on category theoretic models of autonomous living organisms
- developing Complex Systems Biology from the point of view of Relational Biology as well as Quantum Genetics
- developing a rigorous theoretical foundation for living organisms as "anticipatory systems"
Rosen's work combines sophisticated mathematics with potentially radical new views on the nature of living systems and science. He has been called "biology's Newton." 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 posthumous work Essays on Life Itself as well as recent monographs by Rosen's student Aloisius Louie have clarified and explained the mathematical content of Rosen's work.
Relational biology
Rosen's work proposed a methodology which needs to be developed in addition to the current reductionistic approaches to science by molecular biologists. He called this methodology Relational Biology. Relational is a term he correctly attributes to his mentor Nicolas Rashevsky, who published several papers on the importance of set-theoretical relations in biology prior to Rosen's first reports on this subject. Rosen's relational approach to Biology is an extension and amplification of Nicolas Rashevsky's treatment of n-ary relations in, and among, organismic sets that he developed over two decades as a representation of both biological and social "organisms".Rosen's relational biology maintains that organisms, and indeed all systems, have a distinct quality called organization which is not part of the language of reductionism, as for example in molecular biology, although it is increasingly employed in systems biology. It has to do with more than purely structural or material aspects. For example, organization includes all relations between material parts, relations between the effects of interactions of the material parts, and relations with time and environment, to name a few. Many people sum up this aspect of complex systems by saying that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Relations between parts and between the effects of interactions must be considered as additional 'relational' parts, in some sense.
Rosen said that organization must be independent from the material particles which seemingly constitute a living system. As he put it:
Rosen's abstract relational biology approach focuses on a definition of living organisms, and all complex systems, in terms of their internal organization as open systems that cannot be reduced to their interacting components because of the multiple relations between metabolic, replication and repair components that govern the organism's complex biodynamics.
He deliberately chose the `simplest' graphs and categories for his representations of Metabolism-Repair Systems in small categories of sets endowed only with the discrete "efficient" topology of sets, envisaging this choice as the most general and less restrictive. It turns out however that the efficient entailments of systems are "closed to efficient cause", or in simple terms the catalysts 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. Rosen stated: "I argue that the only resolution to such problems is in the recognition that closed loops of causation are 'objective'; i.e. legitimate objects of scientific scrutiny. These are explicitly forbidden in any machine or mechanism." Rosen's demonstration of "efficient closure" was to present this clear paradox in mechanistic science, that on the one hand organisms are defined by such causal closures and on the other hand mechanism forbids them; thus we need to revise our understanding of nature. 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.
Complexity and complex scientific models: (''M,R'') systems
The clarification of the distinction between simple and complex scientific models became in later years a major goal of Rosen's published reports. Rosen maintained that modeling is at the very essence of science and thought. His book Anticipatory Systems describes, in detail, what he termed the modeling relation. He showed the deep differences between a true modeling relation and a simulation, the latter not based on such a modeling relation.In mathematical biology he is known as the originator of a class of relational models of living organisms, called systems, that he devised to capture the minimal capabilities that a material system would need in order to be one of the simplest functional organisms that are commonly said to be "alive". In this kind of system, stands for the metabolic and stands for the 'repair' subsystems of a simple organism, for example active 'repair' RNA molecules. Thus, his mode for determining or "defining" life in any given system is a functional, not material, mode; although he did consider in his 1970s published reports specific dynamic realizations of the simplest systems in terms of enzymes, RNA, and functional, duplicating DNA.
He went, however, even further in this direction by claiming that when studying a complex system, one "can throw away the matter and study the organization" to learn those things that are essential to defining in general an entire class of systems. 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 for the simplest functional organisms. He supported this claim based on the fact that living organisms are a class of systems with an extremely wide range of material "ingredients", different structures, different habitats, different modes of living and reproduction, and yet we are somehow able to recognize them all as living, or functional organisms, without being however vitalists.
His approach, just like Rashevsky's latest theories of organismic sets, emphasizes biological organization over molecular structure in an attempt to bypass the structure-functionality relationships that are important to all experimental biologists, including physiologists. In contrast, a study of the specific material details of any given organism, or even of a type of organisms, will only tell us about how that type of organism "does it". Such a study doesn't approach what is common to all functional organisms, i.e. "life". Relational approaches to theoretical biology would therefore allow us to study organisms in ways that preserve those essential qualities that we are trying to learn about, and that are common only to functional organisms.
Robert Rosen's approach belongs conceptually to what is now known as Functional Biology, as well as Complex Systems Biology, albeit in a highly abstract, mathematical form.