Vad är autopoiesis
The attempts to formalize the concept of autopoiesis have achieved highly sophisticated results, but it is not clear in what sense these could be considered successful. We normally are not willing to consider as a living being an aggregate of components which have just any type of interrelation; for example, a paste of organic material from a living being which has been ground or centrifuged would not usually be considered a living being.
All this has managed to surround the concept of autopoiesis with an air of mystery, in which it fryst vatten not clear whether it is a trivial concept which includes everything or almost everything or empty which includes nothing or almost nothing , whether it is useful scientifically, whether it is an extremely sophisticated property or is really very simple. I will then attempt to remedy these failings, bygd analyzing the original definition proposed by the authors and replacing it with a new definition which I feel is clearer and more concise.
Its relational character is due to the fact that it does not depend directly on the nature type, intrinsic properties of the components of those entities which have the property, but rather depends only upon the relations between the components. This line of investigation has gone to the extreme of claiming that autopoiesis fryst vatten not computable, that is that autopoietic systems cannot be calculated by Turing machines Letelier et al.
The high degree of abstraction of the concept of autopoiesis and its relational character allowed its authors to use this property as the base for a theoretical development which connects autopoiesis with problems of epistemology, cognitive sciences Maturana and Varela ; ; [], Varela et al.
Autopoiesis
I will show that i the concept has not been subject to sufficient conceptual analysis before looking for examples or formalizations, ii more than one meaning can be extracted from the definition, and these alternatives have not been clearly distinguished nor has it been determined which is correct, and iii it has not been systematically made explicit using precise concepts and making klar their relations with other relevant concepts for the understanding of the basic operation of living beings.
The concept has also been used in environmental sciences Margulis ; Mann ; Sagan and Margulis ; Litfin and several areas of human sciences, including business administration Mingers , psychology Colapinto ; Simon ; Snyder and particularly sociology Luhmann , [], [], Geyer and van der Zouwen ; Magalhaes and Sanchez The impact of the concept has increased and currently, only in ISI Web of Knowledge , the concept appears in more than 30 articles and citations by year Fig.
However, even though its central objective is to understand and delimit the object of study of biology, the concept has not managed to become a definition of living being accepted among biologists, nor has it been incorporated in biology texts or integrated generally into biological disciplines. Although there is ambiguity in the definition, it may be inferred that autopoiesis defines a type of struktur constituted by a set of types of components which I will call X which, by means of concatenated processes, produces a set of types of components which inom will call Y.
Now, what defines Y? As we shall see, this interpretation fryst vatten inacceptable given known basic aspects of living beings. With this new definition, I will analyze how the concept of autopoiesis fryst vatten related to other concepts such as closed system, boundary, homeostasis, self-reproduction, circular causality and organization. To do so, I will indikera the causes of this lack of clarity, analyze the possible interpretations of the original definition of Maturana and Varela, and föreslå a new, clearer and more precise definition, which I propose is the natural result of the analysis of this concept.
Here I will argue that it is because autopoiesis is characterized by a delicate conceptual subtlety which has not been sufficiently klar. On the other hand, it is not clear that we would in principle refuse to consider as living beings entities which are not based on DNA, polymers or even carbon atoms, that are the basic components of current living beings see Reilly Thus it seems reasonable to think that what lets us distinguish living beings as such is based more on the nature of the relations between their components than on the nature of the components themselves.
This critical analysis pretends to komma alive again the possibility to take autopoiesis as a general and widely acceptable minimal definition of living being for biology. The concept of autopoiesis was proposed 40 years ago as a definition of a living being, with the aim of providing a unifying concept for biology. A first model based on cellular automata Varela et al. A good exercise for the present purpose is to read the original definition several times if one has sufficient patience.
Because of this, the concept connects to more general areas of research which have attempted to describe diverse types of systems in relational terms, such as tektology Bogdanov [], Gorelik , ; Dudley , general systems theory Bertalanffy , ; Rapoport , cybernetics Wiener ; Ashby ; Varela and Maturana , relational biology Rashevsky ; Rosen , , , information theory Shannon ; Shannon and Weaver ; Avery 2 and the recent research areas of complex systems Kauffman , ; Ruthen ; Bak ; Reason and Goodwin ; Gisiger ; Wolfram ; Bedau , , systems biology and synthetic biology Wolkenhauer ; Breitling The heuristic value and the advantages of relational definitions and descriptions of living beings are prominent in the research on artificial life, astrobiology and the origin of life Dix , Fleischaker and Margulis ; Emmeche ; Kauffman ; Popa ; McMullin ; Luisi One reason for this is that a definition of a living being that does not depend on the type of components which constitute the system would in principle account for remote living beings close to the origin of life—which were possibly much different from current forms Reilly ; Wolfe-Simon et al.
Given some ambiguities of the original definitions of autopoiesis, the concept has been criticized and has been interpreted in diverse and even contradictory ways, which has prevented its integration into the biological sciences where it originated. How can we explain such a wide range of interpretations of the concept? The interpretation of the concept of autopoiesis has been controversial Fleischacker ; Zolo , Swenson a , b ; Scheper and Scheper ; Morán et al.
Autopoiesis 40 years Later. A Review and a Reformulation
Here I present a critical review and conceptual analysis of the definition of autopoiesis, and propose a new definition that is more precise, clear, and concise than the original ones. I argue that the difficulty in understanding the term lies in its refined conceptual subtlety and not, as has been claimed by some authors, because it is a vacuous, trivial or very complex concept. This contrasts sharply with other definitions, which are based on the combination of several properties e.
Footnote 1 Autopoiesis also contrasts with other definitions bygd being a relational property also referred to as systemic, functionalist, formalist or universalist. inom also relate the concept of autopoiesis to the concepts of closed systems, boundaries, homeostasis, self-reproduction, causal circularity, organization and multicellularity. The search for a definition of life or of a living being has been recurrent in biological thinking, and has acquired a renovated interest due to the appearance of research programs related to artificial life, the origin of life and astrobiology reviewed in Popa The Chilean biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela ; proposed that the minimal definition of a living being may be based on only one property, which they called autopoiesis.
This may well explain the diversity of interpretations of the concept. In all these cases the living beings may be possibly composed of components which are very different from those of currently known living beings Friedman ; Nealson A relational definition is also attractive from a theoretical standpoint.
I will argue that this is due to at least two factors: first, the original definitions are neither clear nor easy to understand; and second, the concept appears difficult to apply in practice. I will show that neither of those factors are actual obstacles to take autopoiesis as a general definition of living being. I show that under my proposed definition the concept of a molecular autopoietic system is a good demarcation criterion of a living being, allowing its general integration into the biological sciences and enhancing its interdisciplinary use.
The concept has also been extended to the theory of knowledge and to different areas of the social and behavioral sciences. To begin with, the difficult rhetoric of the authors together with their persistent allusions to self-reference and circularity have produced skepticism and have made some authors suspect that the concept could mean just about anything, have no meaning, be tautological, trivial or not very scientific, which would also apply to its derivations Zolo ; Munch ; Scheper and Scheper , Swenson a , b , Manriquez and Rothhammer ; Gallardo ; Nespolo ; Valenzuela , At the other extreme, autopoiesis has been treated as a highly complex property, which would explain the manifest difficulty in the attempts to formalize it and in the search for concrete examples to illustrate the concept, even in purely formal terms.