Instituto de Filosofía y Ciencias de la Complejidad, IFICC, Los Alerces 3024, Santiago, Chile.
Orig Life Evol Biosph. 2012 Dec;42(6):543-67. doi: 10.1007/s11084-012-9297-y. Epub 2012 Oct 4.
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. The concept has also been extended to the theory of knowledge and to different areas of the social and behavioral sciences. 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. 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. I also relate the concept of autopoiesis to the concepts of closed systems, boundaries, homeostasis, self-reproduction, causal circularity, organization and multicellularity. 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.
自组织的概念是 40 年前作为一个活的生物的定义而提出的，旨在为生物学提供一个统一的概念。这个概念也已经扩展到知识论和社会及行为科学的不同领域。鉴于自组织的原始定义有些模糊，这个概念受到了批评，并被以各种甚至相互矛盾的方式进行解释，这阻碍了它在其起源的生物学领域的整合。在这里，我对自组织的定义进行了批判性的回顾和概念分析，并提出了一个比原始定义更精确、更清晰、更简洁的新定义。我认为，理解这个术语的困难在于其精细的概念微妙性，而不是像一些作者所声称的那样，因为它是一个空洞的、琐碎的或非常复杂的概念。我还将自组织的概念与封闭系统、边界、内稳态、自我复制、因果循环、组织和多细胞性联系起来。我表明，在我提出的定义下，分子自组织系统的概念是一个很好的生物分界标准，允许其在生物学领域的广泛整合，并增强其跨学科的应用。
