Essays on Life Itself

Robert Rosen was professor emeritus of biophysics at Dalhousie University and the author of books including Life Itself (Columbia 1991), Principles of Mathematical Biology, and Principles of Measurement.

• Preface Part I : On Biology and Physics 1. The Schrodinger Question, What Is Life? Fifty-Five Years Later 2. Biological Challenges to Contemporary Paradigms of Physics and Mimetics 3. What Is Biology? Part II : On Biology and the Mind 4. The Church-Pythagoras Thesis 5. Drawing the Boundary Between Subject and Object: Comments on the Mind-Brain Problem 6. Mind as Phenotype 7. On Psychomimesis 8. The Mind-Brain Problem and the Physics of Reductionism Part III : On Genericity 9. Genericity as Information 10. Syntactics and Semantics in Languages 11. How Universal Is a Universal Unfolding? 12. System Closure and Dynamical Degeneracy 13. Some Random Thoughts About Chaos and Some Chaotic Thoughts About Randomness Part IV: Similarity and Dissimilarity in Biology 14. Optimality in Biology and Medicine 15. Morphogenesis in Networks 16. Order and Disorder in Biological Control Systems 17. What Does It Take to Make an Organism? Part V: On Biology and Technology 18. Some Lessons of Biology 19. Bionics Revisited 20. On the Philosophy of Craft 21. Cooperation and Chimera 22. Are Our Modeling Paradigms Nongeneric? References Index

These 22 essays are intended for serious thinkers, as they are provocative and often iconoclastic. There are many new ideas, daring perspectives, and challenging modes of interpretation of concepts that readers may have mistakenly thought they understood... I am equally sure that readers will enjoy and benefit from these essays. -- Bruce J. West The Quarterly Review of Biology