Jon Umerez

The autonomy of biological individuals and artificial models

This paper aims to offer an overview of the meaning of autonomy for biological individuals and artificial models rooted in a specific perspective that pays attention to the historical and structural aspects of its origins and evolution. Taking autopoiesis and the recursivity characteristic of its circular logic as a starting point, we depart from some of its consequences to claim that the theory of autonomy should also take into account historical and structural features. Autonomy should not be considered only in internal or constitutive terms, the largely neglected interactive aspects stemming from it should be equally addressed. Artificial models contribute to get a better understanding of the role of autonomy for life and the varieties of its organization and phenomenological diversity.

Cognition and life : The autonomy of cognition

In this paper we propose a philosophical distinction between biological and cognitive domains based on two conditions that are postulated to obtain a useful characterization of cognition: biological grounding and explanatory sufficiency. According to this, we argue that the origin of cognition in natural systems (cognition as we know it) is the result of the appearance of an autonomous system embedded into another more generic one: the whole organism. This basic idea is complemented by another one: the formation and development of this system, in the course of evolution, cannot be understood but as the outcome of a continuous process of interaction between organisms and environment, between different organisms, and, specially, between the very cognitive organisms. Finally, we address the problem of the generalization of a theory of cognition (cognition as it could be) and conclude that this work would imply a grounding work on the problem of the origins developed in the frame of a confluence between both Artificial Life and an embodied Artificial Intelligence.

Howard Pattee's theoretical biology--a radical epistemological stance to approach life, evolution and complexity.

This paper offers a short review of Pattees main contributions to science and philosophy. With no intention of being exhaustive, an account of Pattees work is presented which discusses some of his ideas and their reception. This is done through an analysis centered in what is thought to be his main contribution: the elaboration of an internal epistemic stance to better understand life, evolution and complexity. Having introduced this core idea as a sort of a posteriori cohesive element of a complex but highly coherent and complete system of thinking, further specific elements are also reviewed.

Origin of life as the first MST—control hierarchies and Interlevel relation

We propose an explicit dialogue between MetaSystem Transition (MST) Theory and theoretical biology. Then MST is approached in a double and complementary way. We apply MST to the study of biological levels of organization and we draw some consequences for the understanding of MST mechanisms from the analysis of the essential features of living systems. We explain our understanding of control as specific constraint, of emergence as internal creation of novelty, and of creation of variety and functional selection as complementary phenomena. Grounded on such conceptual primitives, we put forward some theoretical conditions to be fulfilled by different kind of systems, from the classical mechanical ones to the living beings. In each case we apply such conditions to concrete examples. The conclusion is that dissipative structures have self‐organizing abilities but cannot be treated as a MST instance. By the contrary, the very origin of life comes to be a paradigmatic case of MST.

The Evolution of the Symbolic Domain in Living Systems and Artificial Life

The prospective answer I intend to explore in this paper can be introduced through another quote from H. Pattee: “I have argued for many years that life is peculiar, fundamentally, because it separates itself from non-living matter by incorporating, within itself, autonomous epistemic cuts (Pattee, 1969, 1972, 1982, 1993, 1995a). Metaphorically, life is matter with meaning. Less metaphorically, organisms are material structures with memory by virtue of which they construct, control and adapt to their environment. Evolution entails semantic information (Eigen, 1992) and open-ended evolution requires an epistemic cut between the genotype and the phenotype, i.e. between description and construction” (Pattee, 1995b, p. 24).

Where Does Pattee’s “How Does a Molecule Become a Message?” Belong in the History of Biosemiotics?

Recalling the title of Yoxen’s classical paper on the influence of Schrödinger’s book, I analyze the role that the work of H. Pattee might have played, if any, in the development of Biosemiotics. I take his 1969 paper “How does a molecule become a message?” (Developmental Biology Supplement) as a first target due to several circumstances that make it especially salient. On the one hand, even if Pattee has obviously developed further his ideas on later papers, the significance of this one springs out right from the title, the journal and date of publication and, of course, its content. On the other, this paper in particular has been somehow rediscovered recently and not only within the frame of biosemiotics (eg, in history and philosophy of biology by E.F. Keller). Following the parallelism with Yoxen’s perspective, I contend that Pattee’s work was relatively influential with respect to a good amount of attempts to rethink living systems within theoretical biology around the 70s. This influence diminished together with the decay or even collapse of those attempts under the impact of molecular biology as it was being developed those years. Eventually, Pattee’s work has been taken up again. Notwithstanding, it is quite clear that Pattee himself was not intending to contribute specifically to Biosemiotics and that he was probably unaware of any such discipline, at least until recently. Then, we should as well ask (as Yoxen wonders with respect to Schrödinger) to which extent Pattee’s influence has been a direct one or rather an indication of the relevance of his ideas and the resonance of his hypotheses with those of biosemiotics. For this task I will sketch a few points of convergence and divergence and examine the work of some authors who either address directly this issue or have contributed significantly to build up the history of Biosemiotics.

Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (3rd ed.). Elliott Sober (Ed.). (2006, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.)

Conceptual Issues in Evolutionary Biology (3rd ed.). Elliott Sober (Ed.). (2006, Cambridge MA: MIT Press.)

42.00 (paper), 640 pages

42.00 (paper), 640 pages. Evolution on earth is a primary source of interest and inspiration for artificial life, which aims to study life-as-it-could-be by synthetic means. The study of several aspects of evolution has been an essential part of the work done in this field since its official origins about 20 years ago. In particular, modeling evolution has been important for the exploration of living properties, and it also has provided methodological insights to devise a substantial portion of the characteristic tools used by ALife workers, tools that have in fact passed the strict limits of ALife and have been used with many other different purposes. Given the interdisciplinary nature of this research field, many people needed resources for biological inspiration to bring in interesting problems, as well as to analyze how they are known to be solved in nature. Discussions on the conceptual problems of evolutionary biology, either by biologists or by philosophers, may be an interesting way of finding key issues for which an artificial model can provide an answer, or at least an illustration. Sober’s anthology offers the basics for starting a discussion on the philosophy of evolutionary biology, containing the primary sources a teacher could use in a college or university course. It is, perhaps together with Mark Ridley’s Oxford reader [4], the best selection of articles dealing with evolutionary issues and, considering its recent third edition, the most updated. There are, of course, other collections of special interest for ALifers—both more specific, as, for instance, those dealing with the debate on the units of selection and/or evolution (but slightly outdated [1, 2]), or more general, such as the anthology on the philosophy of biology edited by David Hull and Michael Ruse [3] and others forthcoming. This is the third edition of a compilation work of which the first and second editions are still worth keeping. The volume has got smaller and slimmer in each new edition since the first [5], which was almost oversized, making it easier to handle. The first had 35 articles distributed in seven sections: Guiding Ideas in Evolutionary Biology, Fitness, The Units of Selection, Adaptation, Function and Teleology, The Reduction of Mendelian Genetics to Molecular Biology, and The Nature of Species. The second had 23 articles, of which 13 were new with respect to the first (mostly from the 1980s and 1990s) and distributed in eleven sections, with the inclusion of three new sections on phylogenetic inference, ethics and sociobiology, and cultural evolution and evolutionary epistemology; the division of the section ‘‘The Nature of Species’’ into one section on species and another on systematic philosophies, and also changes the title of one section from ‘‘Guiding Ideas’’ to ‘‘Essentialism and Population Thinking.’’ Finally, the third edition, which is the object of this review, contains 27 articles, out of which 13 are new and subsequent to 1994 (with two exceptions), distributed in 13 sections. The former sections on function and teleology and on systematic philosophies have been discarded, and four new ones, on women in the evolutionary process, evolutionary