Robert Rosen followed his teacher N. Raschevsky at Chicago in the 50's with the idea of a Relational Biology. Raschevsky pointed out (he's one of the father's of mathematical biology) that whilst we were surely able to take apart a living cell, we were not any closer to putting one together for all the reduction we were doing. In short, reductionist thinking was not going to provide the answers we were looking for.

Ultimately, Rosen took that out to the level of a mathematics of the relations amongst components. He brings back the 4 Aristotelian causalities and ties everything together with category theory. The book, Life Itself (and a new one published just after his death, Essays on Life Itself) discusses and develops this mathematics. At least, it develops it to the level of a theoretical understanding. Nobody, to my knowledge, has managed yet to map his thinking to, say, the mathematics of a single-celled animal. There's a helluva lot of thinking going on in that direction, however. Raschevsky started with graph theory, graduated to organismic set theory, then passed away. Rosen took that work to category theory.

The more I read, the more I discover that things really are related, and it is the mathematics of those relations that jumps beyond my level of mathematical maturity. Simple relational algebra seems a place to start, but discovering the topology of those relations is something else again.

How, then, does this short ramble tie in with the bootstrap group? As I see it, if reductionist thinking isn't going to get us there, perhaps we ought to explore whatever it is that will. I respectfully submit that Rosen's thinking does, indeed, open some doors not yet explored.

All of the above :-)

Sincerely,

Jack Park