Robert Rosen

Robert Rosen was an American theoretical biologist, born in Brooklyn on 27 June 1934 and died on 28 December 1998.¹ He took a PhD in relational biology under Nicolas Rashevsky at the University of Chicago in 1959, stayed there until 1964, and then moved to the University at Buffalo with a joint appointment at its Center for Theoretical Biology.¹ In 1975 he went to Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, as a Killam Research Professor in physiology and biophysics, and stayed until he took early retirement in 1994.¹ He was president of the Society for General Systems Research, now the International Society for the Systems Sciences, in 1980 and 1981.¹

His work asked what life is, and held that a reductionist physics of mechanisms could not answer the question.¹ He proposed relational biology, which treats an organism by its organisation, the relations among its parts and with time and environment, and devised the (M,R) systems as minimal relational models of a living thing.¹ A year-long sabbatical at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions in Santa Barbara led him to what he called anticipatory systems theory.¹ His book Anticipatory Systems sets out what he called the modelling relation between a natural system and a formal one, and separates a true modelling relation from a simulation not based on such a relation.¹ Its publisher credits the book with founding the area of anticipatory systems theory.² His daughter, Judith Rosen, writes that she spends much of her time making his work accessible, and that she counts anticipatory systems theory as its most important part.³

He is the author of Anticipatory Systems, and his definition of an anticipatory system appears in the entry on foresight and anticipation. The Handbook of Anticipation includes him in its historical overview of earlier thinkers.⁴