Life Itself: A Comprehensive Inquiry Into Nature, Origin, and Fabrication of Life

By Robert Rosen

Copyright 1991

Contents

1. Prolegomenon
1. What Is Life?
2. Why the Problem Is Hard
3. The Machine Metaphor in Biology
2. Strategic Considerations: The Special and the General
1. Basic Concepts
2. From General to Special
3. From the Special to the General
4. Induction and Deduction: A Preliminary Note
5. On the Generality of Physics
3. Some Necessary Epistemological Considerations
1. Back to Basics
2. The First Basic Dualism
3. The Second Basic Dualism
4. Language
5. On Entailment in Formal Systems
6. On the Comparison of Formalisms
7. Entailment in the Ambience: Causality
8. The Modeling Relation and Natural Law
9. Metaphor
4. The Concept of State
1. Systems and States
2. Chronicles
3. Recursive Chronicles
4. Recursion: Some General Features
5. On Taylor's Theorem
6. Recursion and Constraints
7. Coping with Nonrecursiveness: Recursion and Constraint in Sets of Chronicles
8. Newton's Laws
9. On Entailment in Physics: Cause and Effect
10. Quantum Mechanics, Open Systems, and Related Matters
5. Entailment Without States: Relational Biology
1. A New Direction
2. Nicolas Rashevsky
3. On the Concept of "Organization" in Physics
4. The Concept of Function
5. On the Strategy of Relational Modeling
6. The Component
7. Systems From Components
8. Entailments in Relational Systems
9. Finalistic Entailment: Function and Finality
10. Augmented Abstract Block Diagrams
11. Finality in Augmented Abstract Block Diagrams
12. The Theory of Categories
6. Analytic and Synthetic Models
1. Modeling Relations
2. Some Preliminaries: Equivalence Relations
3. Analysis and Cartesian Products
4. Direct Sums
5. Analytic and Synthetic: Comparison and Contrast
6. The Category of all Models of S
7. On Simulation
1. The Machine Concept
2. Some General Heuristic Remarks
3. The Algorithm
4. Simulation and Programming
5. Simulation and Programming Continued
6. Simulations and Models
8. Machines and Mechanisms
1. Review
2. Machines and Mechanisms
3. On the Largest Model of a Mechanism
4. On the Smallest Models of a Mechanism
5. Maximum Model from Minimal Models
6. On States and Recursivity in Mechanisms
7. Sythesis and Antisynthesis: Fractionability
8. Mechanisms and Contemporary Physics
9. Relational Theory of Machines
1. Machines
2. The Basic Ideas
3. The Second Step
4. Entailment in Machine Models
5. The Third Step
6. The Central Argument: The Limitations of Entailment in Machines and Mechanisms
7. Conclusions
10. Life Itself: The Preliminary Steps
1. The Answer
2. The "Machine Metaphor" Revisited
3. Relational Models of Organisms
4. A Word About Fabrication
11. Relational Biology and Biology
1. What is Biology?
2. The Paradoxes of Evolution
3. Mendel, Heredity, and Genetics
4. Biochemistry, Genetics, and Molecular Biology
5. Chemistry and Sequence
6. Protein Folding and Morphogenesis
7. A Word on Entailment in Evolution
8. Relation Biology and Its Realizations