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Cultural-Biology: Systemic Consequences of Our Evolutionary Natural Drift as Molecular Autopoietic Systems

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Abstract

Our purpose in this essay is to introduce new concepts (dynamic architecture and dynamic ecological organism-niche unity, among other) in a wide and recursive view of the systemic consequences of the following biological facts that I (Maturana in Biology of cognition, 1970, Unity and diversity of man. Le Seuil, Paris, 1978; Maturana and Varela in Autopoiesis and cognition: the realization of the living. D. Riedel Publishing Co, Boston, 1980, El Árbol del Conocimiento: Las Bases Biológicas del Conocer Humano, 1a Edición. Editorial Universitaria, Santiago, 1984; Maturana and Mpodozis in Rev Chil Hist Nat 73:261–310, 2000) and we (Maturana and Dávila in Habitar humano: en seis ensayos de biología-cultural. Juan Carlos Sáez Editorial, Chile, 2008) have presented that can be resumed as: (1) that as living systems we human beings are molecular autopoietic system; (2) that living systems live only as long as they find themselves in a medium that provides them with all the conditions that make the realization of their living possible, that is, in the continuous conservation of their relation of adaptation to the circumstances in which they find themselves; (3) that as a living system exists only in a relation of adaptation with the medium that operates as its ecological niche, its reproduction necessarily occurs as a process of systemic duplication or multiplication of the ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates; (4) that the worlds of doings that we generate as languaging beings in our conversations, explanations, reflections and theories are part of our ecological niche; and (5) that we human beings as living beings that exist in languaging, are biological–cultural beings in which our cultural and our biological manners of existences can be distinguished but cannot be separated. Of the systemic consequences of these biological facts that we consider in this essay, we wish to mention two as the principal: (1) that the diversification of manners of living produced in biological evolution is the result of differential survival in a changing medium through the conservation of adaptation, and not through competitive survival of the best; and (2) that we in our living as languaging human beings (observers) are the epistemological fundament of all that we do and know as such.

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Notes

  1. Ximena Dávila Yáñez and Humberto Maturana Romesín created Matríztica as an Institute that later has become a school for studying our human manner of living as person that fundamentally care for avoiding the possible negative the consequences of what they do on the living of other persons and the biosphere … and sometimes do not. Now we think of Matríztica as a School of the South of the World for Ideas, Understanding and doings that expand the harmony of the anthroposphere and the biosphere that we humans generate with what we do.

  2. Our zoological denomination as species is Homo sapiens, but we have decided to speak about us human beings calling our psychic evolutionary identity Homo sapiens - amans amans to refer to the manner of living that begun to be conserved from one generation to the next in the learning of the children since the origin of their living in languaging in an ancestral family in which the ontogenic conservation of love defined their manner of living.

  3. Love in our human domain is a word that connotes a relational dynamics in which the participants of an interaction do not act with demand or expectation for a particular response of the other in their encounter, and proceed in the relation according whatever is happening in it in a way such that if there is no coherence for going on the participants separate, and if there is coherence they continue in the interaction in the pleasure of the company each conserving its individual identity. In our human domain the love dynamics is the fundament of our coexisting in wellbeing in the conservation of our respective individual identities. Accordingly, the relational dynamics that makes possible the living of living beings as molecular autopoietic systems is love, and it is so as a basic relational condition that arises and occurs in the existing of a living system but is not part of its living. We call this fundamental love relation basic or primary love ecological relation because it is the local condition of possibility for anything to occur in the cosmos that arises as we explain the coherences of our living with the coherences of the realization of our living.

  4. We human beings operate as multisensory observers as we make distinctions, that is, in any distinction that we make we do it being involved in it with all our sensoriality. Therefore, in what follows whenever we speak of the observer or of observing we refer to us human beings involved with all our sensoriality in making the distinction that we are making.

  5. Existence arises with the operation of distinction of the observer because all that he or she can talk about what appears as he or she makes a distinction is that what he or she distinguishes arises with characteristics or properties that result defined by what he or she does in the operation of distinction through which it appears. As we realize that we do not distinguish in the experience between what we may later call a perception or an illusion, we also realize that we can only talk about what we do.

  6. When we speak of systemic reproduction we refer to the fact that when organism reproduces what happens is that what is indeed reproduced is the organism and its dynamic ecological niche because the organism does not exist as a living system without it. The systemic reproduction involves both genetic and not genetic phenomena in the systemic involving of its dynamic ecological niche in the phenomenon of reproduction itself.

  7. The medium is what an observer sees as the great operational container in which the dynamic ecological niche of whatever he or she distinguishes arises as that dynamic part of it in which the distinguished entity occurs while it occurs. Although in this essay in particular we speak of the dynamic ecological niche of living beings, this notion applies to everything, entity or process that we distinguish.

  8. When we speak of ontogenic phenotype we refer to the form of realization of the living of a particular living being in the ecological dynamic niche that arises with it. What is conserve in the constitution of a lineage in the process of systemic reproduction is an ontogenic phenotype that involves the configuration ecological organism-niche unity.

  9. The notion of systemic reproduction was first presented in English in the article “The origin o the species by means of natural drift” written by Humberto Maturana-Romesín and Jorge Mpodozis, and was published in the “Revista Chilena de Historia Natural vol. 73, the year 2000. The English version is an expansion of an article published in the same journal the year 1992 with the same title but in English.

  10. An epigenetic process occurs in the manner that we describe with the use of a toy, a lego. Imagine that you give to your son or daughter a lego in which the instructions that come with it only tell: (1) Take a piece that says on it beginning totality, and fit on it the pieces that you see fit with it. (2) After you have done that you will see that you have in your hands a new totality that looks very different from the first one, and whose shape tells you that now it is possible to fit other pieces that could not have been put together before. (3) After you have done, that you have in your hands a new totality that look different from the first and second one, and see that its shape tell you that now you can fit on it other pieces that you could not have fit on the previous totality. 4. After you have done that, you have in your hands a new totality that looks different … and the instructions tell you that if you recursively repeat this process you will find that an unexpected figure appears.

  11. As observers we distinguish two kinds of unities, simple unities and composite unities. When we distinguish a simple unity we distinguish a totality interacting in its niche by means of features or properties that arise with the operation of distinction with which we distinguish it, and in which we do not or cannot distinguish components. When we as observer distinguish a totality in which we distinguish components, we distinguish a composite unity of which we can speak of organization and structure.

  12. What we scientists do is not what we say that we do when we say that science is an objective manner of knowing the cosmos, the universe, and the reality in which we exists. And we usually are not aware of this because we do not ask ourselves about what is to know. What we indeed do as we do science is to explain what we do in our living with what we do generating domains of sensory–operational–relational coherences in the realization of our living. And we do this as we explain proposing generative process in the sensory–operational–relational coherences that if they operate in the domain of the realization of our living give rise as a result to experience that we want to explain. And this is how science expands the domain of our doings in the domain of our doings.

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Maturana R., H., Dávila Yáñez, X. & Ramírez Muñoz, S. Cultural-Biology: Systemic Consequences of Our Evolutionary Natural Drift as Molecular Autopoietic Systems. Found Sci 21, 631–678 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10699-015-9431-1

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