RELATIONAL BIOLOGY!
A field I’d never heard of but I’ve been tripping over for years. I just knew when I saw “theoretical biology”, I’d like it. But I think it’s _this_ that I liked – a very abstract view of life’s systems in relation to other systems (mechanical, social, etc) Apparently started by Robert Rosen – but wait – I can skip and generalize!
“Comparison with other theories of life
(M,R) systems constitute just one of several current theories of life, including the chemoton of Tibor Gánti, the hypercycle of Manfred Eigen and Peter Schuster, autopoiesis (or self-building) of Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, and the autocatalytic sets of Stuart Kauffman, similar to an earlier proposal by Freeman Dyson. All of these (including (M,R) systems) found their original inspiration in Erwin Schrödinger’s book What is Life? but at first they appear to have little in common with one another, largely because the authors did not communicate with one another, and none of them made any reference in their principal publications to any of the other theories. Nonetheless, there are more similarities than may be obvious at first sight, for example between Gánti and Rosen. Until recently there have been almost no attempts to compare the different theories and discuss them together.”
So these are the 3 links that are of the “bring them together”, which hopefully will compare them and find commonalities. Good!
Letelier, J C; Cárdenas, M L; Cornish-Bowden, A (2011). “From L’Homme Machine to metabolic closure: steps towards understanding life”. J. Theor. Biol. 286 (1): 100–113. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.06.033.
Igamberdiev, A.U. (2014). “Time rescaling and pattern formation in biological evolution”. BioSystems. 123: 19–26. doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2014.03.002.
Cornish-Bowden, A; Cárdenas, M L (2020). “Contrasting theories of life: historical context, current theories. In search of an ideal theory”. BioSystems. 188: 104063. doi:10.1016/j.biosystems.2019.104063.
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