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Complexity in Ecological Systems
Life Itself: A Comprehension Inquiry into the Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life
Why are living things alive? As a theoretical biologist, Robert Rosen saw this as the most fundamental of all questions-and yet it had never been answered satisfactorily by science. The answers to this question would allow humanity to make an enormous leap forward in our understanding of the principles at work in our world.
For centuries, it was believed that the only scientific approach to the question "What is life?" must proceed from the Cartesian metaphor (organism as machine). Classical approaches in science, which also borrow heavily from Newtonian mechanics, are based on a process called "reductionism." The thinking was that we can better learn about an intricate, complicated system (like an organism) if we take it apart, study the components, and then reconstruct the system-thereby gaining an understanding of the whole.
However, Rosen argues that reductionism does not work in biology and ignores the complexity of organisms. Life Itself , a landmark work, represents the scientific and intellectual journey that led Rosen to question reductionism and develop new scientific approaches to understanding the nature of life. Ultimately, Rosen proposes an answer to the original question about the causal basis of life in organisms. He asserts that renouncing the mechanistic and reductionistic paradigm does not mean abandoning science. Instead, Rosen offers an alternate paradigm for science that takes into account the relational impacts of organization in natural systems and is based on organized matter rather than on particulate matter alone.
Central to Rosen's work is the idea of a "complex system," defined as any system that cannot be fully understood by reducing it to its parts. In this sense, complexity refers to the causal impact of organization on the system as a whole. Since both the atom and the organism can be seen to fit that description, Rosen asserts that complex organization is a general feature not just of the biosphere on Earth-but of the universe itself.
For centuries, it was believed that the only scientific approach to the question "What is life?" must proceed from the Cartesian metaphor (organism as machine). Classical approaches in science, which also borrow heavily from Newtonian mechanics, are based on a process called "reductionism." The thinking was that we can better learn about an intricate, complicated system (like an organism) if we take it apart, study the components, and then reconstruct the system-thereby gaining an understanding of the whole.
However, Rosen argues that reductionism does not work in biology and ignores the complexity of organisms. Life Itself , a landmark work, represents the scientific and intellectual journey that led Rosen to question reductionism and develop new scientific approaches to understanding the nature of life. Ultimately, Rosen proposes an answer to the original question about the causal basis of life in organisms. He asserts that renouncing the mechanistic and reductionistic paradigm does not mean abandoning science. Instead, Rosen offers an alternate paradigm for science that takes into account the relational impacts of organization in natural systems and is based on organized matter rather than on particulate matter alone.
Central to Rosen's work is the idea of a "complex system," defined as any system that cannot be fully understood by reducing it to its parts. In this sense, complexity refers to the causal impact of organization on the system as a whole. Since both the atom and the organism can be seen to fit that description, Rosen asserts that complex organization is a general feature not just of the biosphere on Earth-but of the universe itself.
285 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 1991
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April 21, 2016
To pose the question of life, wrote Robert Rosen, “requires an almost infinite audacity”; moreover, “to strive to answer it compels an equal humility.” And so it is that Life Itself, the crowning achievement of Rosen’s lifelong engagement with biology, straddles the line between the two in an effort as breathtaking as it is monumental. Indeed, as Rosen brilliantly demonstrates, to even approach the question ‘what is life?’ requires a rethinking not just of the foundations of biology – foundations which have hitherto dismissed such questions as unscientific – but of the very scope of physics and, in its wake, the entire scientific enterprise along with it.
Such then, is the undertaking embarked upon here, one pursued with both mathematical precision and rhetorical grandeur. I don’t invoke mathematics as a metaphor by the way – as a mathematically trained biophysicist, Rosen frequently turns to the world of mathematics – abstract algebra, number theory, general topology and category theory in particular – to shore up and strictly define the many extraordinary claims put forth within. This doesn’t make for easy reading, but when coupled with Rosen’s tremendous powers of articulation and clear-eyed grasp of the conceptual issues involved, what it makes for instead is decidedly necessary reading.
While the appeal to math might seem strange in a book about life, the key lies in Rosen’s particular epistemology. For Rosen, mathematical formalisms, with their machinery of inferential entailments, allow us to do nothing less than model or otherwise mirror the causal entailments of systems found in nature. This mirroring of entailments, inferential on the one hand and causal on the other, enables Rosen to make some very precise observations about the types of entailment structures attributed to nature by contemporary science. As it turns out, nature – and life in particular – simply exhibit structures of entailment far richer than can be captured by the relatively impoverished formalisms so far employed by modern day science.
Summarized thusly, it’s hard to appreciate the momentous shift in thinking that such an insight calls for – let alone the myriad of ramifications thereby entailed. Yet among the singular virtues of Life Itself is its proffering of new mathematical, scientific and conceptual tools by which to break out of the deadlocks faced by science in the light of the living. So tightly crafted is Rosen’s narrative - which unfolds with the tension of a detective story – that the answer to the question of life almost seems to just ‘fall out’ of Rosen’s wide ranging discussions into causality, complexity, modeling, and just about any area of interest to those with a stake in the future of science and - why not? - philosophy. As for that answer itself, well – you’ll just have to read the book.
Such then, is the undertaking embarked upon here, one pursued with both mathematical precision and rhetorical grandeur. I don’t invoke mathematics as a metaphor by the way – as a mathematically trained biophysicist, Rosen frequently turns to the world of mathematics – abstract algebra, number theory, general topology and category theory in particular – to shore up and strictly define the many extraordinary claims put forth within. This doesn’t make for easy reading, but when coupled with Rosen’s tremendous powers of articulation and clear-eyed grasp of the conceptual issues involved, what it makes for instead is decidedly necessary reading.
While the appeal to math might seem strange in a book about life, the key lies in Rosen’s particular epistemology. For Rosen, mathematical formalisms, with their machinery of inferential entailments, allow us to do nothing less than model or otherwise mirror the causal entailments of systems found in nature. This mirroring of entailments, inferential on the one hand and causal on the other, enables Rosen to make some very precise observations about the types of entailment structures attributed to nature by contemporary science. As it turns out, nature – and life in particular – simply exhibit structures of entailment far richer than can be captured by the relatively impoverished formalisms so far employed by modern day science.
Summarized thusly, it’s hard to appreciate the momentous shift in thinking that such an insight calls for – let alone the myriad of ramifications thereby entailed. Yet among the singular virtues of Life Itself is its proffering of new mathematical, scientific and conceptual tools by which to break out of the deadlocks faced by science in the light of the living. So tightly crafted is Rosen’s narrative - which unfolds with the tension of a detective story – that the answer to the question of life almost seems to just ‘fall out’ of Rosen’s wide ranging discussions into causality, complexity, modeling, and just about any area of interest to those with a stake in the future of science and - why not? - philosophy. As for that answer itself, well – you’ll just have to read the book.
October 2, 2021
First third of the book is a brilliant exposition of how/why physics "works". Second third of the book is an intro to Category Theory and the final third of the book completes the argument for why physics is the wrong substrate for understanding complexity as is always there in biology/life. To be honest, I don't fully grok the argument for category theory itself and likely need to read an intro to Category Theory someplace else to really get it. I overall buy the argument for alternative modeling approaches (honestly I can't articulate it as well but I feel the book's argument is not very far saying that having a neural-network modeling the relational function between entities should be fine for scientific models) But would recommend even just for the first third of the book!
May 2, 2013
Not easy to follow, but full of very deep insights about biology and its place within the mechanicist paradigm of science.
I confess I haven't finished it, but it really deserves patient and careful reading as well as reflection.
For very similar ideas read Varela and Maturana books on the concept of Autopoiesis and the unsuitability of the machine metaphor when applied to living beings.
I confess I haven't finished it, but it really deserves patient and careful reading as well as reflection.
For very similar ideas read Varela and Maturana books on the concept of Autopoiesis and the unsuitability of the machine metaphor when applied to living beings.
Currently reading
September 23, 2014Challenges the current approach to biology that assumes that we can essentially be described as machines. He says that from the beginning that will exclude some considerations and cripple our understanding and inquiry. For a free taste read the "Note to Reader" which is available on the Amazon page when you click 'Look Inside'.
February 16, 2022
So this book is 95% math and equations. If you are already an accomplished biologist or scientist, then this book is for you. If you are a layman or just curious, I wouldn’t go out of your way to read this. As really the whole book should have been the first and last chapters.
The author writes like a professor giving a lesson. Which is great except you can’t stop him and ask a question to clarify. His attempts to self clarify never made things any clearer for me. The last chapter was really all you need to read to get to the point. Everything before it was him mathematically proving his points. Which is great! Except extremely boring. Most of it could have just been stated and agreed through critical thinking by the reader. It was neat to see the math behind it but people don’t think like that in reality.
The last chapter was great though. Overall, the question of “what is life” needs to be answered and while to me, his answer seems more like vitalism without saying that’s what it is, it is still an interesting idea.
The author writes like a professor giving a lesson. Which is great except you can’t stop him and ask a question to clarify. His attempts to self clarify never made things any clearer for me. The last chapter was really all you need to read to get to the point. Everything before it was him mathematically proving his points. Which is great! Except extremely boring. Most of it could have just been stated and agreed through critical thinking by the reader. It was neat to see the math behind it but people don’t think like that in reality.
The last chapter was great though. Overall, the question of “what is life” needs to be answered and while to me, his answer seems more like vitalism without saying that’s what it is, it is still an interesting idea.
December 13, 2019
A very good introduction to what could be called theoretical biology by my former graduate school professor. A bit too mathematical in its build up and a bit minimal in its application of that mathematics to biology but provocative and thought provoking nonetheless. Well written and logically presented.
December 22, 2021
Really tough, incredibly interesting read. I'm not 100% convinced of Rosen's points due to what feel like pretty old school epistemological underpinnings but still reading this definitely expanded my thinking in nice ways.
Read
March 11, 2016Ground breaking and thought provoking. A paradigm shift in the way we think about life and our notions of past, present and future.
June 23, 2024
A REJECTION OF THE “LIFE IS A MACHINE” VIEW, IN FAVOR OF “RELATIONAL”
Robert Rosen (1934-1998) was an American theoretical biologist and Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1991 book, “This book represents part of the outcome and present status of about thirty years’ work on the problem ‘What is life?’ Some of it has appeared elsewhere… But most of it, especially the epistemological considerations at the heart of it, has accumulated unpublished and unpublishable, except in this form.” He adds in the ‘Note to the Reader,’ “it should always be borne in mind that this book is about biology… I am well aware that most of the ideas developed herein seem, in isolation, to have little to do with conventional biology. But … even those [ideas] that seem most remote in terms of their … content, may turn out to lie very close together indeed in some appropriate topology… It has turned out that, in order to say what life IS, we must spend a great deal of time in understanding what life is NOT.” (Pg. xv) Later, he adds, “They say that all science must start from experience. Mine was that relational models and mechanical models… were not going together… My conclusion … was that … there were some deep and essential things embodied in that fact.” (Pg. xix)
He outlines, “The question ‘What is life?’ is not often asked in biology, precisely because the machine metaphor already answers it: ‘Life is a machine.’ Indeed, to suggest otherwise is regarded as unscientific and viewed with the greatest hostility as an attempt to take biology back to metaphysics. This is the legacy of the machine metaphor. I hope to convince the reader… that the machine metaphor is not just a little bit wrong; it is entirely wrong and must be discarded.” (Pg. 23)
He summarizes, “Contemporary biology has concerned itself almost exclusively with the endlessly fascinating epiphenomena of life, but the secrets are not to be found there… Therefore, we MUST approach the problem from a new direction… At the moment, biology remains a stubbornly empirical, experimental, observational science. The papers and books that define contemporary biology emanate largely from laboratories of increasingly exquisite sophistication… geared primarily to isolate, manipulate, and characterize minute quantities of matter… On the other hand, a science indifferent to its own basic questions can hardly be said to be in its ideal situation, or indeed, anywhere near it… whatever biology will be tomorrow, it will not be merely an extrapolation of what it is today. So our direction of approach to biology will be… an unfamiliar one, which has been called ‘relational biology.’” (Pg. 108-109)
He explains, “ANY system is ORGANIZED to the extent that it can be analyzed into or built out of constituent components. The characteristic relationships between such constituent components, and… the system as a whole, comprise a new and different approach to science itself, which we may call the ‘relational theory of systems.’… from a relational point of view, we can meaningfully ask ‘why?’ about organized systems in ways simply inaccessible to contemporary physics… Thus, in particular, the formalisms (relational models) into which organized systems encode will look very different, and in fact be very different, from the ones we have exclusively seen heretofore.” (Pg. 117) He adds, “I can epitomize a reductionistic approach to organization … to life in particular, as follows: throw away the organization and keep the underlying matter. The relational alternative to this says the exact opposite, namely: when studying an organized material system, throw away the matter and keep the underlying organization.” (Pg. 119)
He states, “In a sense, it is the thrust of this entire work that this hypothesis of ‘analysis = synthesis’ must be dropped… is we are to do biology… By dropping it, we enter a new realm of system, which I call ‘complex,’ and which in certain sense needs to have no synthetic models at all. The distinction between relational and Newtonian models of natural systems will become crucial here, because … the former extend to the realm of complex systems, while the latter cannot.” (Pg. 154)
He notes, “I have argued from a machine to another natural system, in which its COMPONENTS are themselves entailed. I have thus implicitly invoked a new kind of entailment between natural systems in the external world, one we have not seen before. This is in fact a form of what is called in philosophy IMMINENT CAUSATION and involves ontological, as well as epistemological, considerations. We did not get to God this way, as Aristotle and others thought they did, but as we shall see, it will take us out of the class of mechanisms.” (Pg. 235-236)
He asserts, “The picture we have painted looks bleak indeed, if we insist on identifying SCIENCE with MECHANISM. But… there is no basis for such an identification. Mechanism is merely one way of expressing Natural Law, a way we happen to have become used to… The failure of a natural system to be a mechanism does not at all mean that it has no mechanistic models… the nongenericity of mechanisms becomes clear… Degeneracy means invisibility, and this is why no amount of refinement or generalization of a mechanistic formalism… can do other than generate another mechanistic formalism.” (Pg. 242-243)
He argues, “there is no way to go from machines to organisms… However, we can easily go the other way. Namely, give a relational description of an organism… we can easily find subdiagrams that look like (the diagrams of) machines. Put another way, organisms generally have many different machine models. But the organism itself is not in any sense a direct sum of such models; it can only be considered as a kind of limit to them.” (Pg. 247)
He concludes, “if soma is not machine, then evolutionary processes are not devoid of entailment. That is: evolution is not to be regarded as a matter of unentailed ‘frozen accident,’ a matter of pure history of historical chronicle, and immune to Natural Law. Such a view can only be maintained if somatic biology is entirely a matter of software and hardware, with hardware unable to entail anything about its software… and the program unable to change the hardware.” (Pg. 275) He adds, “complexity, though I suggest it is the habitat of life, is not itself life. Something else is needed to characterize what is alive from what is complex…. Organization … inherently involves FUNCTIONS and their interrelations… there is no kind of 1 to 1 relationship between such relational, functional organizations and the structures which realize them. These are the basic differences between organisms and mechanisms or machines.” (Pg. 280)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying ‘deeper’ issues of biology.
Robert Rosen (1934-1998) was an American theoretical biologist and Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.
He wrote in the Preface to this 1991 book, “This book represents part of the outcome and present status of about thirty years’ work on the problem ‘What is life?’ Some of it has appeared elsewhere… But most of it, especially the epistemological considerations at the heart of it, has accumulated unpublished and unpublishable, except in this form.” He adds in the ‘Note to the Reader,’ “it should always be borne in mind that this book is about biology… I am well aware that most of the ideas developed herein seem, in isolation, to have little to do with conventional biology. But … even those [ideas] that seem most remote in terms of their … content, may turn out to lie very close together indeed in some appropriate topology… It has turned out that, in order to say what life IS, we must spend a great deal of time in understanding what life is NOT.” (Pg. xv) Later, he adds, “They say that all science must start from experience. Mine was that relational models and mechanical models… were not going together… My conclusion … was that … there were some deep and essential things embodied in that fact.” (Pg. xix)
He outlines, “The question ‘What is life?’ is not often asked in biology, precisely because the machine metaphor already answers it: ‘Life is a machine.’ Indeed, to suggest otherwise is regarded as unscientific and viewed with the greatest hostility as an attempt to take biology back to metaphysics. This is the legacy of the machine metaphor. I hope to convince the reader… that the machine metaphor is not just a little bit wrong; it is entirely wrong and must be discarded.” (Pg. 23)
He summarizes, “Contemporary biology has concerned itself almost exclusively with the endlessly fascinating epiphenomena of life, but the secrets are not to be found there… Therefore, we MUST approach the problem from a new direction… At the moment, biology remains a stubbornly empirical, experimental, observational science. The papers and books that define contemporary biology emanate largely from laboratories of increasingly exquisite sophistication… geared primarily to isolate, manipulate, and characterize minute quantities of matter… On the other hand, a science indifferent to its own basic questions can hardly be said to be in its ideal situation, or indeed, anywhere near it… whatever biology will be tomorrow, it will not be merely an extrapolation of what it is today. So our direction of approach to biology will be… an unfamiliar one, which has been called ‘relational biology.’” (Pg. 108-109)
He explains, “ANY system is ORGANIZED to the extent that it can be analyzed into or built out of constituent components. The characteristic relationships between such constituent components, and… the system as a whole, comprise a new and different approach to science itself, which we may call the ‘relational theory of systems.’… from a relational point of view, we can meaningfully ask ‘why?’ about organized systems in ways simply inaccessible to contemporary physics… Thus, in particular, the formalisms (relational models) into which organized systems encode will look very different, and in fact be very different, from the ones we have exclusively seen heretofore.” (Pg. 117) He adds, “I can epitomize a reductionistic approach to organization … to life in particular, as follows: throw away the organization and keep the underlying matter. The relational alternative to this says the exact opposite, namely: when studying an organized material system, throw away the matter and keep the underlying organization.” (Pg. 119)
He states, “In a sense, it is the thrust of this entire work that this hypothesis of ‘analysis = synthesis’ must be dropped… is we are to do biology… By dropping it, we enter a new realm of system, which I call ‘complex,’ and which in certain sense needs to have no synthetic models at all. The distinction between relational and Newtonian models of natural systems will become crucial here, because … the former extend to the realm of complex systems, while the latter cannot.” (Pg. 154)
He notes, “I have argued from a machine to another natural system, in which its COMPONENTS are themselves entailed. I have thus implicitly invoked a new kind of entailment between natural systems in the external world, one we have not seen before. This is in fact a form of what is called in philosophy IMMINENT CAUSATION and involves ontological, as well as epistemological, considerations. We did not get to God this way, as Aristotle and others thought they did, but as we shall see, it will take us out of the class of mechanisms.” (Pg. 235-236)
He asserts, “The picture we have painted looks bleak indeed, if we insist on identifying SCIENCE with MECHANISM. But… there is no basis for such an identification. Mechanism is merely one way of expressing Natural Law, a way we happen to have become used to… The failure of a natural system to be a mechanism does not at all mean that it has no mechanistic models… the nongenericity of mechanisms becomes clear… Degeneracy means invisibility, and this is why no amount of refinement or generalization of a mechanistic formalism… can do other than generate another mechanistic formalism.” (Pg. 242-243)
He argues, “there is no way to go from machines to organisms… However, we can easily go the other way. Namely, give a relational description of an organism… we can easily find subdiagrams that look like (the diagrams of) machines. Put another way, organisms generally have many different machine models. But the organism itself is not in any sense a direct sum of such models; it can only be considered as a kind of limit to them.” (Pg. 247)
He concludes, “if soma is not machine, then evolutionary processes are not devoid of entailment. That is: evolution is not to be regarded as a matter of unentailed ‘frozen accident,’ a matter of pure history of historical chronicle, and immune to Natural Law. Such a view can only be maintained if somatic biology is entirely a matter of software and hardware, with hardware unable to entail anything about its software… and the program unable to change the hardware.” (Pg. 275) He adds, “complexity, though I suggest it is the habitat of life, is not itself life. Something else is needed to characterize what is alive from what is complex…. Organization … inherently involves FUNCTIONS and their interrelations… there is no kind of 1 to 1 relationship between such relational, functional organizations and the structures which realize them. These are the basic differences between organisms and mechanisms or machines.” (Pg. 280)
This book will be of keen interest to those studying ‘deeper’ issues of biology.
February 4, 2021
Another day, another book left unfinished. This time I made it about halfway before boredom set it.
I picked up Life Itself wanting to know more about complexity in ecological systems. What I got (up until halfway in) was a deep mathematical investigation into the scientific method and its flaws, and recursion in the context of knowledge acquisition.
A substantial affinity for mathematics is a pre-requisite for this book but, even then, it might not be for you. I get the sense that those who like it will love it but most, like me, will be lost, confused, and wondering what the fuck the author is going on about and what the point of all those words are.
You have been warned.
I picked up Life Itself wanting to know more about complexity in ecological systems. What I got (up until halfway in) was a deep mathematical investigation into the scientific method and its flaws, and recursion in the context of knowledge acquisition.
A substantial affinity for mathematics is a pre-requisite for this book but, even then, it might not be for you. I get the sense that those who like it will love it but most, like me, will be lost, confused, and wondering what the fuck the author is going on about and what the point of all those words are.
You have been warned.
December 9, 2024
Even though I have a physics degree, understanding this book required me to learn a lot of math and some physics. Can't recommend enough as a book to help you completely tear down and rebuild your thinking about the universe, causality, time, and life.
June 25, 2025
Thought provoking, but still not completely convincing. Formal definitions are often not present when they should be or used in a contradictory way.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews