Robert Rosen (June 27, 1934 – December 28, 1998) was an American theoretical biologist and Professor of Biophysics at Dalhousie University.

Career

Rosen was born on June 27, 1934, in Brownsville (a section of Brooklyn), 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 (SUNY) — 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 (ISSS), 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 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. Rosen argued that the fundamental question "What is life?" cannot be adequately addressed from within a scientific foundation that is reductionistic. Approaching organisms with reductionistic scientific methods and practices sacrifices the functional organization of living systems in order to study the parts. The whole, according to Rosen, could not be recaptured once the biological organization had been destroyed. By proposing a sound theoretical foundation for studying biological organisation, Rosen held that, rather than biology being a mere subset of the already known physics, it might turn out to provide profound lessons for physics, and also for science in general.

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 (2000) 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: