Has anyone out there read this 1991 book, or any of Rosen's other writing? If you look on Amazon,
the book gets incredibly glowing reader reviews. I read "Life Itself" a few years ago.
His views seem interesting to me in relation to the question of "What is Life?" or the recent thread
"a definition of 'living being'"
Rosen is pushing a viewpoint he calls Relational Biology and which is apparently based on the ideas
of Rashevksy. This seems to be a kind of General Systems Theory, except that instead of the
quantitative mathematics of differential equations, Rosen uses the qualitative mathematics of
category theory. Also shared with General System Theory is a vague distrust of reductionism.
The interesting thing, to me, is that he uses Aristotle's taxonomy of "causality" in a novel way.
It is a cliche that biological systems are open with respect to material causation - they are
thermodynamic open systems.
It is also a foundation of our mechanistic view of nature that they are closed with respect to final
causation - they serve no one's purpose but their own.
But Rosen claims that they are also unusual when you look at formal and efficient causation. Formal
cause, of course, means information. Living systems take no, or almost no, instruction from outside
themselves, if you define "instruction" narrowly. But define it more broadly, and the ways in which
living systems receive information from the outside world and convert this formal causation into a
response (utilizing the other modes of causation) is quite interesting indeed to biologists. So is
the flow of formal causation from past environments into current genetics via natural selection.
The key idea, though, relating to attempts to define "Life", has to do with efficient cause. Rosen
claims that living systems are almost completely closed to efficient causation. Enzymes, for
example, can be viewed as the efficient cause of the product molecule that they produce. But the
efficient cause of the enzyme is itself a molecule within the cell, as is the efficient cause of
that, and so on, ad infinitum. Life is closed with respect to efficient cause. And no other system
in the universe is closed in this way to both efficient and final cause.
That is, Rosen thinks that a minimal definition of life has to include metabolism. In fact, though
he doesn't say this, it apparently has to be "autopoeic" in the sense of Varella and Maturana.
Therefore, a naked gene would not be alive, by Rosen's definition, because it relies on the
environment for its "replicase" function rather than creating that functionality itself. It is open
to efficient cause.
It is not clear how you would APPLY any of these ideas in every day biology. But, I do think they
are interesting at a philosophical level.