Jorge Soto-Andrade

TL;DR: Rosen's insight represents a valuable tool for understanding metabolic networks, and it is shown how one might generate self-referential objects f with the remarkable property f(f)=f, where f acts in turn as function, argument and result.

TL;DR: The definition of life has excited little interest among molecular biologists during the past half‐century, and future advances, for example, for creating artificial life or for taking biotechnology beyond the level of tinkering, will need more serious attention to the question of what makes a living organism living.

TL;DR: A proper understanding of the nature of life will require metabolism to be treated as a complete system, and not just as a collection of components, because any serious investigation of how this can be possible implies an infinite regress.

TL;DR: The major insight in Robert Rosen's view of a living organism as an (M,R)-system was the realization that an organism must be "closed to efficient causation", which means that the catalysts needed for its operation must be generated internally.

TL;DR: In this paper, an extension of Lawvere's Theorem showing that all classical results on limitations stem from the same underlying connection between self-referentiality and fixed points is presented.