Varela, Francisco

M.-Carmen Estevez Hector Font Mikaela Nichkova J.-Pablo Salvador Begona Varela Francisco Sanchez-Baeza M.-Pilar Marco (IS )... 

In this regard, I would like to cite Francisco Varela in one of his last interviews before his death (in Poerksen, 2004) ... 

Reverse micelles are small (1-2 nm in diameter), spherical surfactant aggregates huilt in an apolar solvent (usually referred to as oil), whereby the polar heads form a polar core that can contain water - the so-called water pool. The connection with autopoiesis is historically important, because it was with the collaboration with Francisco Varela that the work started (in fact it began as a theoretical paper - see Luisi and Varela, 1990). The idea was this to induce a forced micro-compartmentalization of two reagents, A and B, which could react inside the boundary (and not outside) to yield as a product the very surfactant that builds the boundary (Figure 7.13). The product S would concentrate at the membrane interface, which increases its size. Since reverse micelles are usually thermodynamically stable in only one given dimension, this increase of the size-to-volume ratio would lead to more micelles. Thus the growth and multiplication would take place from within the structure of the spherically closed unit, be governed by the component production of the micellar structure itself, and therefore (as will be seen better in... 

Finally, in the list of things that autopoiesis does not include, the term information should be added. This is mostly due to Francisco Varela s deep concern -which I share - about the misuse of this term in most of the current bioscience literature. When this term is not essential, it may be omitted. 

The term chemical autopoiesis indicates the experimental implementation of autopoiesis in the chemistry laboratory. The most well known of these processes is the self-reproduction of micelles and vesicles. This has been discussed in the previous chapter, where the original idea of Francisco Varela and myself was to work with bounded systems that would produce their own components due to an internal reaction, respecting the scheme illustrated in Figure 8.3. We came up with the idea of using reverse micelles (refer back to Figure 7.13) with two reagents. 

Some readers may recognize in all these ideas a flavor of Buddhism. I mention this because the life and thoughts of Francisco Varela were indeed significantly influenced by Buddhism. The Embodied Mind (Varela et a/., 1991) is in fact a book... 

To some extent, these ideas about consciousness are present in modern cognitive science, although with different forms and terminology, and the interested reader can refer to more specialized literature, for example the work by Damasio (1999) or by le Doux (2002). There are now many books on the subject of consciousness and many novel academic institutions devoted to the study of consciousness, with much emphasis on the relation between brain and mind. This is certainly remarkable in an area dominated by the molecular paradigm. Very little has yet been done to connect this with a bio-logical theory of life as a property from within, but I believe that the trend will move in this direction. In this sense, Francisco Varela has again been somewhat of a pioneer. 

Weber, A. (2002). The surplus of meaning . Biosemiotic aspects in Francisco J. Varela s philosophy of cognition. Cybernetics Human Knowing, 9, 11-29. 

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. 

Sokal, R.R and Rohlf, F.J. (1994). Biometry. The principles and practice of statistics in biological research, 3 ed. San Francisco, CA W.H. Freeman and Company. Tukey, J.W. 1971. Exploratory Data Analysis. Reading, MA Addison-Wesley. Varela, F. and Shear, J. 1999. The view from within. Fawrence, KS Imprint Academic Press. 

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