Montévil Maël, Mossio Matteo
IHPST - UMR 8590 13, rue du Four 75006 Paris, France.
J Theor Biol. 2015 May 7;372:179-91. doi: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2015.02.029. Epub 2015 Mar 6.
We propose a conceptual and formal characterisation of biological organisation as a closure of constraints. We first establish a distinction between two causal regimes at work in biological systems: processes, which refer to the whole set of changes occurring in non-equilibrium open thermodynamic conditions; and constraints, those entities which, while acting upon the processes, exhibit some form of conservation (symmetry) at the relevant time scales. We then argue that, in biological systems, constraints realise closure, i.e. mutual dependence such that they both depend on and contribute to maintaining each other. With this characterisation in hand, we discuss how organisational closure can provide an operational tool for marking the boundaries between interacting biological systems. We conclude by focusing on the original conception of the relationship between stability and variation which emerges from this framework.
我们提出了一种将生物组织概念化为约束闭合的形式化描述。我们首先区分了生物系统中起作用的两种因果机制：过程，它指的是在非平衡开放热力学条件下发生的所有变化；以及约束，这些实体在作用于过程时，在相关时间尺度上表现出某种形式的守恒（对称性）。然后我们认为，在生物系统中，约束实现了闭合，即相互依赖，使得它们既相互依赖又有助于维持彼此。有了这种描述，我们讨论了组织闭合如何能提供一种操作工具来界定相互作用的生物系统之间的边界。我们通过关注从这个框架中浮现出的稳定性与变异性之间关系的原始概念来得出结论。
