Cognitive Biology: Dealing with Information from Bacteria to Minds

by Gennaro Auletta

Providing a new conceptual scaffold for further research in biology and cognition, this book introduces the new field of Cognitive Biology: a systems biology approach showing that further progress in this field will depend on a deep recognition of developmental processes, as well as on the consideration of the developed organism as an agent able to modify and control its surrounding environment. The role of cognition, the means through which the organism is able to cope with its environment, cannot be underestimated. In particular, it is shown that this activity is grounded on a theory of information based on Bayesian probabilities. The organism is considered as a cybernetic system able to integrate a processor as a source of variety (the genetic system), a regulator of its own homeostasis (the metabolic system), and a selecting system separating the self from the non-self (the membrane in unicellular organisms). Any organism is a complex system that can survive only if it is able to maintain its internal order against the spontaneous tendency towards disruption. Therefore, it is forced to monitor and control its environment and so to establish feedback circuits resulting in co-adaptation. Cognitive and biological processes are shown to be inseparable.

880 pages, Hardcover

First published July 14, 2011

About the author

Gennaro Auletta is Aggregate Professor in the Gregorian University, Researcher in the Cassino University, and Scientific Director of the STOQ Project. He is also visiting professor in the University of Notre Dame, associate of the Faraday Institute of the Cambridge University, and member of the Linnean Society of London. After taking his degree in philosophy at La Sapienza University in Rome he took his Ph.D and his Postdoc in Philosophy at the same university. His philosophical interests are logic, philosophy of nature (with special connections with quantum mechanics and biology), philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. In science, his main interests are in quantum mechanics (quantum information, foundations, interpretation). For the last ten years his research interests have addressed issues in the treatment of information by biological systems (from bacteria to human brain), in cognitive neurosciences.

Reviews

[Aidan · Rating 1 out of 5]

To say that this guy isn't an easy read, is to put it mildly. Auletta is extremely dense, and exceptionally difficult to understand. That is not an exaggeration.

Auletta is the type of author who understands what he is talking about himself, but he makes the fatal mistake of assuming his readers also possess all the knowledge he does, make all the same connections as he does, and treats the subject he is talking about accordingly. He skims over a huge number of complex issues he introduces in a blink of an eye, not even bothering to make sense of what he is presenting. You just have to take his word for it. He doesn't elaborate on connections and inferences he makes. He doesn't explain why one thing is or is not. He just states what is and you are left to just accept those statements.

I bought this book without a thorough background check on the edition, and it has taught me to be more careful in the future. In retrospect I would skip it. If one is interested in this subject, there are a number of qualitatively better authors out there to take up.

Auletta has bitten off a bigger piece than he can chew with this book. He is the opposite of clear, concise and rational.