Varela and Maturana

Armando Aranda May I ask you, do you have any kind of key differences in your notion of autopoiesis and the one proposed by Maturana and Varela ... 

Steven Rose No, it s very close, Maturana and Varela argued this. I haven t heard them argue it in quite this sort of way but the concept is close. 

In fact, the life of a cell is the starting point for the development of the ideas of autopoiesis (from the Greek auto, or self, and poiesis, or producing) developed by Maturana and Varela (Varela et ah, 1974 Maturana and Varela, 1980 Maturana and Varela, 1998). The aim of this chapter is to review the notion of autopoiesis and to present it in the context of present-day research in the life sciences. This will imply some addition to, and modification of, the original theory and also of a recent review of mine on which the first part of this outline is based (Luisi, 2003b). 

From these simple, basic observations, Maturana and Varela (often referred to as the Santiago school) arrived at a characterization of living systems based on the autopoietic unit. An autopoietic unit is a system that is capable of sustaining itself due to an inner network of reactions that regenerate the system s components (Varela etal., 1974 Maturana and Varela, 1980 Luisi, 1997 Maturana and Varela, 1998 Varela, 2000 Luisa et al, 1996). 

Accordingly, changes, mutations, and evolution are seen as the result of the maintenance of the internal structure of the autopoietic organism. Since the dynamic of the environment may be erratic, the result in terms of evolution is a natural drift, determined primarily by the inner coherence and autonomy of the living organism. In this sense, Maturana and Varela s view (Maturana and Varela, 1980 1986) is close to Kimura s (1983) theory of natural drift and to Jacob s (1982) notion of bricolage. Evolution does not pursue any particular aim - it simply drifts. The path it chooses is not, however, completely random, but is one of many that are in harmony with the inner structure of the autopoietic unit. 

We go back now to the question of whether and to what extent autopoiesis is the necessary and sufficient condition for cellular life. In the early days of autopoiesis, Maturana and Varela explicitly wrote (Maturana and Varela, 1980, p. 82) that autopoiesis is necessary and sufficient to characterize the organization of living systems and Gail Fleischaker, in the previously cited review on autopoiesis... 

Autopoiesis and the chemoton a comparison of the views of Ganti with those of Maturana and Varela... 

Maturana, H. R. and Varela, F. J. (1998), The Tree of Knowledge The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, Shambhala, Boston, MA. 

Maturana, H. and Varela, F. (1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition The Realization of the Living. Reidel. 

Artificial life is an entirely new approach to the fundamental problems of biology, because it allows us to study life in a totally different way, i.e. by building machines that have some of its properties. It must be underlined, however, that silicon-based life is utterly different from carbon-based life because artificial molecules and artificial cells are made of electronic circuits and are therefore two-dimensional creatures. This explains why biologists have not abandoned more traditional approaches, and the search for a proper definition of organic life has never stopped. In this field, an important step forward was made in 1974 by Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana and Ricardo Uribe, with the paper that introduced in biology the concept of autopoiesis. 

H.R. Maturana and F.J. Varela Autopoiesis and Cognition, The Realization of the Living. With... 

Maturana H, Varela F (1980) Autopoiesis and cognition the realization of the living. Reidl,... 

The molecules DNA and RNA are considered in autopoiesis only as participants in the cell s self-production and not for their ability to self-reproduce and/or evolve. Varela and Maturana often emphasize that before one can talk about the properties of life, one has to have a place to host them. The container and the logic must be there first. Likewise, in describing a car, before talking about the nature of the fuel,... 

In order to illustrate their idea, Varela and Maturana used the tale (already exploited by Alexander Oparin) of a green man from Mars who comes to Earth and wants to discover what kind of life exists on our planet. He makes a long list of terrestrial objects but is not so sure about their living status, and asks a farmer to help him. The farmer takes a look at the list and immediately divides the objects in two columns, living at the left and not-living at the right ... 

Varela FG, Maturana HR, Uribe R (1974) Autopoiesis the organization of living systems, its characterization and a model. Biosystems 5 187-196... 

This concept has been developed by Luisi and coworkers in a series of papers over the last few years, which have been particularly concerned with autopoiesis, as originally defined by Varela and Maturana. ° The proposition is that vesicles can be considered as possible precursors of protocells. 

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