Abstract
While nominally addressing here models of living systems, we consider that in doing so we automatically address models of Nature itself, in both its organic and inorganic appearances. We distinguish between the conceptual existence of life and its current instantiation, and address static and dynamic aspects of life. The limited number of previous models of life here considered are Robert Rosen’s (M,R) Systems (this extensively), Maturana and Varelas’ Autopoietic Systems, James Grier Miller’s book Living Systems, Gerard Jagers op Akkerhuis’s Operator Hierarchy, Ehresmann & Vanbremeerschs’ Memory Evolutive Neural Systems, Thomas Sebeok and Thure von Uexkülls’ Approach to Biosemiotics, and Chris Langton’s Life at the Edge of Chaos. We conclude with a comment on the inappropriate nature of restricting modelling mappings to one-to-one and many-to-one, thus excluding one-to-many, which may itself provide the basis for system evolution.
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Notes
- 1.
We have intentionally left mathematics out of the sequence here: in conventional physics descriptions, mathematics does not appear in Nature ’s evolutionary sequence, even though arguably it should!
- 2.
‘ Chaos is the beginning, simplicity is the end’—M. C. Escher, in a letter to Oey Tjeng Sit.
- 3.
Turing proposed an ‘imitation game’ to decide whether a machine could ‘think’, which entails an investigator putting questions to the machine , which can then answer in a non-vocal manner (e.g. by a teleprinter). The degree to which the investigator is unable to distinguish between the machine ’s style of answers over a period of time and that of a parallel human participant characterizes the machine ’s capabilities, and leads to a possible conclusion that it is capable of ‘thought’. Turing asked the following question: ‘Let us fix our attention on one particular digital computer C. Is it true that by modifying this computer to have an adequate storage, suitably increasing its speed of action, and providing it with an appropriate programme, C can be made to play satisfactorily the part of A in the imitation game, the part of B being taken by a man?’.
- 4.
Aristotle (1994–2009) divided the ‘cause’ or ‘raison d’ être’ or ‘explanation’ or ‘origin’ of an entity into four parts: material cause , formal cause , efficient cause and final cause . In the case of a built house, for example, material cause is the bricks, etc. used in construction; formal cause is the architect’s plans for the house; efficient cause is the workmen carrying out the job; final cause is the meaning of the house …, e.g. to live in.
- 5.
… leaving aside here the complications of ‘one gene , more than one protein ’ which are associated with alternative splicing (see, for example, Gravely 2001).
- 6.
There is no generally agreed value for this percentage, which is variously quoted with values between 1 and 5%. In any case, protein-coding sequences only make up a minute fraction of some 3 billion base-pairs of human DNA .
- 7.
Conrad Waddington’s (1942) term for ‘the interactions of genes with their environment , which bring the phenotype into being’.
- 8.
Miller (1978, p. 1042) states: ‘The fact that organs cannot live independently of organisms may lead some to question whether the organ is really a distinct level of (a) living system . However, organs are clearly different in structure from either cells or organisms, and some organs do have local decision-making processes’. He (p. 1030) also states: ‘There may be more than seven levels of living systems—for instance, the tissue may exist as a level between the cell and the organ , although there are probably no tissues all of whose cells are controlled by a single decider ’.
- 9.
Rachel Carson’s seminal work ‘Silent Spring’ was only published in 1962, and it took many years for the ‘ecological movement ’ to get off the ground.
- 10.
Here we clearly part company with Miller (1978 p. 1026), who states: ‘The conceptual system outlined in this book concerns concrete systems that exist in physical space -time and have the constraints that go with such existence . It does not, however, relate to all possible such concrete systems’. A major reason for our ‘parting company’ is that our own approach is far more abstract than that of Miller, who takes into account the contents of, and processes exemplifying, different levels of a living system , which we do not.
- 11.
Our thanks to Edwina Taborsky for this example of firstness , secondness and thirdness .
- 12.
We distinguish between the scientific ‘deterministic chaos ’, as associated with the logistic plot , and ‘causal chaos ’, which is associated with the internally completely unstructured ‘chaos ’ as it is referred to in common parlance.
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Cottam, R., Ranson, W. (2017). And Yet It Moves. In: Bridging the Gap between Life and Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74533-6_6
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