Definition
The authors’ definition of the autopoietic system has evolved through the years. One of them states that an autopoietic system is organized (defined as a unity) as a network of processes of production (transformation and destruction) of components that produces the components which: (1) through their interactions and transformations regenerate and realize the network of processes (relations) that produced them; and (2) constitute it (the machine) as a concrete unity in the space in which they exist by specifying the topological domain of its realization as such a network (Varela 1979, p. 13). Nearly the same formula was earlier used to define an autopoietic machine (Maturana and Varela 1973/1980, 1984/1987, p. 135).
Characteristics
The Chilean biologists H. Maturana and F. Varela proposed the term autopoiesisin the early 1970s to account for the organization of individual living beings, characterized as a process by which they produce their own identity in a mechanistic...
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References
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Acknowledgments
LB has a Juan de la Cierva Research Contract ((MICINN/UPV-EHU). AE’s research was funded by the MICINN (FFI2008-06348-C02-01/FISO & FFI2008-06348-C02). AE’s and LB’s research was funded by the Basque Government grant (IT 505-10).
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Bich, L., Etxeberria, A. (2013). Systems, Autopoietic. In: Dubitzky, W., Wolkenhauer, O., Cho, KH., Yokota, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Systems Biology. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9863-7_83
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