A Review of Properties of Life: Toward a Theory of Organismic Biology (2023), by Bernd Rosslenbroich; MIT Press Vienna Series in Theoretical Biology, $60 paperback; free PDF on MIT Direct).

While walking down a crowded city street, most of us would intuitively recognize that the blue jay squawking, the linden tree rustling, the mosquito buzzing, the grass growing, and the humans bustling are all alive, whereas the cars, the gravel stones in driveways, the buildings, and the clouds overhead are not. Distinguishing between living and non-living is for us easy, direct, and all but completely automatic. When, however, we turn away from our intuitive recognition of life towards a reflective attempt to define life, we then run into seemingly insuperable problems. In order to define life, we need to create a chasm that would separate the organic from the inorganic by isolating the essence of life, or at least by providing a list of characteristics that everything with life has and which are all absent from every non-living being.

After a couple thousand years, and hundreds of proposed definitions and lists, there is not yet any consensus. If we cannot define life, then how could we possibly study it? How could we have a logos (account/understanding) of biology if we cannot agree on what life (bios) is? Perhaps the problem is even deeper. Many scientists and philosophers would argue that the reason for our failure to define lifeis, to be blunt, because there is no such thing. For these thinkers, there are only physical and chemical substances,processes, and causes. At the end of the day, there really is no distinction between blue jays and cars, linden trees and gravel stones.

Bernd Rosslenbroich, in his new book Properties of Life: Toward a Theory of Organismic Biology, proposes a different and more fruitful approach. Instead of worrying over pinning down the essence of life, or boxing it up with a definition, why not simply make a list of those striking and mysterious phenomena that all biologists encounter in their work? Rosslenbroich acknowledges that many, if not most, contemporary biologists would advocate some form of mechanistic reductionism. Yet, he shows that in their actual empirical research, they keep coming back over and over again to characteristics of life that seem widespread and are not able to be reduced down to exclusively physico-chemical causes. Rosslenbroich’s overall method in the book is thus quite similar to much of Stephen Talbott’s writing. Both go into great depth and detail to show that the empirical findings of modern biology are almost always more qualitative, holistic, and organism-centered than the theoretical assumptions of modern biology allow.

The longest and best part of the text is “Chapter 4: Properties of Life,” where he spends a great deal of time describing fifteen characteristics — for example, autonomy, agency, morphodynamics, subjective experience, evolvability, and reproduction — that are admitted by all modern biologists, yet which resist standard explanations.

Let us take, for example, the first property he considers, which he calls “Interdependencies.” He reminds us of something we probably recall from high school biology, yet most likely did not give a second thought. A good deal of the processes that modern biologists have discovered, and now take for granted, are actually cycles, e.g., the citric acid cycle (the Krebs cycle). Here we have quite a profound mystery. For a cycle cannot be understood by linear causality, like a series of dominoes. The end result and final effect is also the first cause of the next cycle, which means we must start thinking in circles and “circular causality” rather than straight lines. Indeed, we need a whole new and ever-expanding taxonomy to chart the different forms of interdependencies.

Rosslenbroich lays out a few to start us off: linear causation, multiple effects, multiple causality, circular causation, networks, trigger causality, constraints, and regulatory/cybernetic systems. But the citric acid cycle is just a drop in the ocean of all the indefinitely complex interweaving and interdependent processes involved in almost any biological activity such as, for example, eating and digesting your lunch. The book spends twenty pages going through all these minutiae of “Interdependencies.” All of that for just the first of the fifteen characteristics he investigates.

Rosslenbroich emphasizes that his book is meant only as a beginning (the subtitle is Toward a Theory of Organismic Biology) and by no means pretends to offer a final theory of life. The fifteen properties themselves are just suggestions and meant to initiate interest in other researchers to develop a new organismic way of approaching biology. In 2016, he published a paper that is an early summary version of the book wherein he lists only ten characteristics. Ten, fifteen, twelve, or twenty does not matter — Rosslenbroich wants us to leave aside bickering about lists and definitions. Instead, start by making your own list of vital phenomena and then get to work trying to gain a more living understanding of them.

Some features of an adult bird that can be studied. *Source*: Drawing courtesy of Angela Rosslenbroich

The author stresses throughout that when we take an unbiased phenomenological approach to these characteristics, we find ourselves required to develop better ideas and more holistic ways of speaking. He develops, for example, a notion of “concurrency” in an attempt to forge a new organismic vocabulary that moves away from reductive notions of causality and simplistic notions of complexity. I found this notion of concurrency to be powerful and highly suggestive.

The book is primarily addressed to those who work in modern academia and mainstream science. Its style of writing and method of argument reflect its intended audience, for its goal is to show that the empirical findings of modern biology themselves demand that we rethink its conceptual foundations. Those who are not working in academia or mainstream science may find a good deal of the book to be hard going. Rosslenbroich also makes clear in the final chapter that the book, as a whole, is but a first foray into an organismal biology that he hopes will become more prominent in the future. His book ends where Craig Holdrege’s whole organism studies begin.

T.S. Eliot once asked, “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?” Contemporary biology is inundated with beautiful and wonderful experimental findings. Often, it is drowning in a deluge of information. What is needed, perhaps now more than ever, is what Rosslenbroich, following Conrad Hal Waddington, calls “biological wisdom” (p. 276). Only through returning to such wisdom might we have any hope for a future biology that is vitalized by living thinking and a future bio-technology that does not merely manipulate life, but seeks regeneration and increased fecundity. For those hoping to contribute to this work by participating in mainstream academic biology, Rosslenbroich’s book will prove a valuable reference manual and a portal through which they might make some first steps.

Organisms and the Phenomena of Life

Ryan Shea