Robert Rosen (June 27, 1934–December 28, 1998) was raised an only child in a Jewish family in Brownsville, Brooklyn, New York City. In early childhood, he developed a fascination with living things that never left him. His curiosity to understand them crystallized into a deep desire to learn what makes living things alive, a question he pursued throughout his entire career. As he worked his way through the public school system in Brooklyn, he chose a path towards science, intending to collect the tools needed to find the answers to his own questions.
He earned a PhD in relational biology at the University of Chicago in 1959 under the supervision of Nicolas Rashevsky and remained at UChicago until 1964. While there, he began to feel that the existing scientific approaches were not sufficient to address Schrödinger’s famous question, What Is Life? This led him to explore the assumptions that formed the foundation of science, including the machine metaphor of Descartes and the clockwork universe of Newton. Together, these left no room for the concept of function — but organisms are replete with functions. Therefore, Rosen had to look farther back in time, to Aristotle’s four categories of causation: efficient, formal, material, and final. He also found, in the newly-developed category theory, a form of mathematics offering useful methods for representing cause in biology, and at UChicago he developed his concept of metabolism-repair (M,R) systems.
After Chicago, he accepted a professorship at SUNY Buffalo with a joint appointment in the Center for Theoretical Biology, and later, he moved to Dalhousie University, where he worked until retirement. In 1970, he took a year-long sabbatical at Robert Hutchins' Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara, California, where he began to develop the foundations of anticipatory systems theory. In Rosen’s view, all organisms were anticipatory, as opposed to being merely reactive. This means that they contain models of their environment, useful to make predictions and to control their own behavior in anticipation of environmental change.
In 1991, after grappling for decades with the question of what makes living things alive, he published Life Itself, his most widely-read book and the culmination of his work up to that point. There, Rosen builds the philosophical and mathematical argument that organisms are not machines, but are part of a more general class of systems, which he calls 'complex'. To achieve this, he returned to Aristotle's four causes as an explanatory framework for causality in natural systems, mapping these to his own mathematical ideas. The conclusion in Life Itself is that an organism is a system closed to efficient causation, for which he provides a mathematical definition and a naturalistic interpretation. After publishing Life Itself, during the 90s, he kept working on ideas for a follow-up book, which was intended to focus on the synthesis of organisms. He did not conclude this sequel, but he left many notes that contain the main intellectual seeds, some of them available in this repository.
For Rosen, science was more than a career. It was part of who he was, as a human being. Science was not fractionable from the man himself, just as organisms cannot be taken apart without losing their living properties. And he came to believe that science is a part of everyone, regardless of profession, because we are integrated into the world around us, constantly making models of our environment.
We believe that Robert Rosen’s work represents valuable perspectives on biology, causality, and science as a whole, and that it deserves to be more widely known and read. Over the last four years, we have taken care in classifying his complete published works, including articles, chapters, commentaries, and books both in and out of print, and most importantly, scanning and sorting a small part of his vast collection of unedited notes, which contain ideas that extend beyond his published works.
Our hope is that interested readers will find a foundation here for a new science of biological systems, one that reflects the nature and complexity of these systems.
Judith Rosen
Pedro Márquez-Zacarías
Emma Bingham
