Subject: Autopoiesis

From: Carl Vilbrandt <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 20 May 2002 21:24:23 +0900

The NPO's and the bio organism itc by laws of the NPO's make them into
one large adaptive organism.
Autopoiesis ideas applied to the creation of micro business transactions
and relationships.

http://www.prototista.com/E-Zine/Autopoiesis.htm
Autopoiesis
& dissipative structures

03.19.02

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Autopoiesis is arguably one
of the most important ideas in the history of biology.

A major node of the new sciences
of complexity, it answers a question that was not answered by the
mechanistic reductionistic approach to biology of the last hundred years:
What is life?

In his book The
Web of Life, Fritjof
Capra argues that a coherent theory of living systems - and an answer
to that question - must include two components:

autopoiesis as the (network)
pattern of life

dissipative structures
as the structure of a living system

Ilya
Prigogine's theory of dissipative structures explained how living
systems maintain their order - their stable structure - in the face
of a constant flux of matter and energy passing through them by dissipating
entropy to their environment. He won the Nobel
prize for that work. More about his theory is explained in this
interview with him and in another essay on this site, coming soon...)

Prigogine's theory also contributes
much to our understanding about how evolution - especially rapid evolution
consistent with Stephen
Jay Gould and Niles
Eldridge's theory of punctuated
evolution - occurs via positive feedback amplifying instabilities
into bifurcations.

However, while all living
systems are dissipative structures, all dissipative structures are not
living systems.

So what is the distinction
between living and nonliving dissipative structures? Autopoiesis. Simply
put, if a dissipative structure (system) is autopoietic, it is alive.
If it is not autopoietic, it is NOT alive.

Autopoiesis was originally
proposed by Chilean biologist Humberto
Maturana (a second site here)
as the answer to two questions at the heart of his life's work:

1. What is the organization
of the living?

2. What takes place in the
phenomenon of perception or cognition?

The answer to both questions
is autopoiesis. That
is, autopoiesis is the key to understanding both life and cognition.
Interestingly, he originally thought these were very separate questions.
They turned out to be essentially the same question. (That is, life
and cognition are different sides of the same coin; see below.)

Maturana later refined and formalized the idea with his student (later
colleague), the late Francisco
Varela.

They
defined autopoiesis as a circular network of production processes in
which the function of each component - each node in the network - is
to participate in the production or transformation of other components
in the network. The entire network continually makes itself. (From The
Web of Life.)

Autopoiesis is sometimes
described by the term "circular organization" to indicate
that it is a closed network of production processes in which the output
of one process ultimately feeds back into itself. However, the term
"circular" does not imply a literal physical circle, but an
abstraction in which parts are linked in a closed loop.

Note that according to this
view, life is not a force, but a process. This distinction between life
as a force and life as a process is important.

In current models of science,
including quantum physics and cosmology, there are only four
known forces: gravity, the electromagnetic force (related to electricity,
magnetism, gamma rays, X-rays, ultraviolet light, visible light, infrared
radiation, microwaves, radio and TV waves), the weak force and strong
force (the latter two operate at the level of the atomic nucleus).

Although the major force
involved in life is the electromagnetic force (the chemical bonds between
the atoms in organic molecules of life are electromagnetic forces),
the electromagnetic force itself is NOT life.

Furthermore, there is no
credible scientific evidence supporting the existence of a "fifth
force" or "vital force" as vitalists
and new age writers contend, as exemplified by
this statement from new age writer Jose
Arguelles: "The Serpent, Chan or Chicchan, represents the life
force, which is the source of innate (DNA) wisdom. To deny this
wisdom is to deny our life force."

Instead, from the view of
complexity, life is not a force but a process. Some complexity scientists
speak of it as an emergence or an emergent property,
that is, a property characterizing a system that is not a property of
the system's parts but that emerges as a result of the (nonlinear)
interaction (a process) of the parts.

In either case, autopoiesis
is the process by which life emerges in dissipative structures.

As biologist Lynn
Margulis explains in her book (with Dorion Sagan) What
is Life?, life is not a noun, but a verb. When autopoiesis stops,
life stops.

Margulis offers a much more
in-depth discussion of autopoiesis and its scientific and cultural implications
in her essay "Big Trouble in Biology", chapter 20 in her book
Slanted
Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis and Evolution (also with Dorion
Sagan) in which she
also contrasts the autopoietic view with the perspective of mechanistic
reductionism that dominates contemporary university biology curricula.

She describes (as does Capra)
biologist Gail Fleischaker's three criteria necessary to define autopoietic
forms:

Self-generating: all components,
including boundary, are produced within the network;

Self-bounded: the system's
self-generating boundary is an integral component of the system;

Self-perpetuating: production
processes continually (over time) replace all components.

The concept of autopoiesis
is similar to hypercycles,
first described by Nobel laureate Manfred Eigen. However, autopoietic
systems are more complex than hypercycles. In particular, as noted in
Fleischaker's criteria, autopoietic systems produce their own boundaries
that participate in the network.

The quintessential autopoietic
systems are biological cells. The simplest, and certainly the first
to evolve on Earth, are bacterial cells. Eukaryotic cells - those of
kingdoms Protoctista,
Animalia, Plantae and Fungi - are also autopoietic.

Autopoiesis is important
to understanding all aspects of cell biology and metabolism, including
respiration, photosynthesis, DNA replication & repair, and protein
synthesis. All of those processes are components in a network of production
processes.

For example, DNA is a template
containing the information for the primary structure of proteins. Some
of those proteins are enzymes that are involved in the replication and
transcription of DNA to produce proteins in protein synthesis.

Photosynthesis and respiration
are processes that transform energy (sunlight and chemical energy of
glucose, respectively) into forms directly usable by living systems
(ATP). Both require numerous enzymes and structural proteins which are
the result of the DNA/protein synthesis nodes. In turn, ATP is required
to fuel DNA synthesis and protein synthesis.

Thus, all of these processes
are linked into a network of production processes, each contributing
to the others.

Autopoiesis also has major
ramifications for our understanding of cognition: specifically autopoiesis
IS cognition. (See Capra's chapters 11 & 12)

More on autopoiesis can also
be found at Principia
Cybernetica Web.