2016 Maturana Davila Ramirez

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

Molecular Autopoietic Systems
Humberto Maturana R., Ximena Dávila

Yáñez & Simón Ramírez Muñoz
Foundations of Science
The official Journal of the Association
for Foundations of Science, Language
and Cognition
ISSN 1233-1821
Volume 21
Number 4
Found Sci (2016) 21:631-678

DOI 10.1007/s10699-015-9431-1
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Author's personal copy
Found Sci (2016) 21:631–678
DOI 10.1007/s10699-015-9431-1
Cultural-Biology: Systemic Consequences of Our

Evolutionary Natural Drift as Molecular Autopoietic
Systems
Humberto Maturana R.1 • Ximena Dávila Yáñez1 •
Simón Ramı́rez Muñoz1
Published online: 28 September 2015

! Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
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 biologı́a-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
& Humberto Maturana R.

humberto@matriztica.org
Ximena Dávila Yáñez
ximena@matriztica.org
Simón Ramı́rez Muñoz
simon@matriztica.org
1
Matriztic School of Santiago, Rosario Sur Street No 91 Office 304, Las Condes, Santiago, Chile
123
632 Humberto Maturana R. et al.
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.
Keywords Humanness ! Cognition ! Evolution ! Living beings ! Epistemology ! Reality
1 Part 1: Where Do We Living Beings Exist?
1.1 Introduction
The reflections that we present here correspond to our thinking in the domain of our living
as biological–cultural beings since we began to work together after creating Matrı́ztica1 in
2000. Therefore, they show our present vision and understanding of our human living as
molecular autopoietic beings that exist as loving languaging persons that generally care for
what happens as a consequence of what they do to other persons, to other living beings and
to the biosphere in general, … but sometimes they do not. Yes, sometimes we human
beings do not care for the consequences of what we do, and we always justify our lack of
care with some ad-hoc theory that negates love blinding us to the fact that love is the
fundamental sensory, operational and relational condition of the harmony of the ecological
ambiance in which a living being can exist, and constitutes the operational relational
matrix that makes possible our human living as Homo sapiens-amans amans2 by making
possible the realization and conservation of our molecular autopoiesis as such.
In Matrı́ztica we have been concerned with the operational unity of the organism and its
manner of living in the realization of its living in the ecological organism-niche unity in
which it exists. And we have done so referring implicitly to the manner of living of an
individual organism as its ‘‘cultural domain’’, acknowledging that the individual life of
every organism occurs as an epigenetic process in an ontogenic history that last as long as
its life. From that perspective this article is an essay in cultural-biology, almost as a new
perspective in our understanding our living as cultural–biological beings. So, we now
present our reflections as cultural-biologists.
We has shown that the relational nature of the realization of the living of a living being
as a molecular autopoietic system, reveals that love3 arises with the arising of the
1
Ximena Dávila Yáñez and Humberto Maturana Romesı́n created Matrı́ztica 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 Matrı́ztica as a School of the South of the World for Ideas, Under-
standing 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
123
Cultural-Biology: Systemic Consequences of Our Evolutionary… 633
molecular autopoietic system as the sensorial–operational–relational dynamics that makes

possible the happening of that part of the medium in which the realization and conservation
of its existence is possible (Maturana and Dávila 2015). In what follows we shall call that
part of the medium that arises simultaneously with a molecular autopoietic system making
it possible, its dynamic ecological niche. In this essay we shall reflect on what appears in
our understanding as we expand our comprehension of how happens the realization of the
living of living systems as they operate as organisms in the dynamic ecological niche that
they integrate. And we shall do so following the implications of the observation that love is
the fundament of the possibility of the arising and the existence of the molecular
autopoietic system and the dynamic ecological niche that makes it possible as well as the
condition of possibility of the relational nature of the realization of our human existence as
socially an ethically conscious living beings. We call this fundamental relation for the
existence of anything, ecological love relation.
Whether we like it or not, we human beings and our living as persons that can reflect on
what they do, are the question, the path to answer it and the answer itself in our attempt to
explain our living and the cosmos that we find ourselves inhabiting. This is why we say
that: ‘‘Everything said is said by a multisensory observer to another multisensory observer
that could be him or herself.’’ (Maturana and Dávila 2015) But to operate as an observer a
multisensory living being must operate (exist) as a languaging reflective being as we
human beings are. And it is in our existing as reflective languaging human beings that we
can operate as observers and we do all that we do as multisensory observers distinguishing
ourselves doing all what we do.
We human beings find ourselves doing what we do when we ask ourselves about ‘‘how
do we do what we do?’’ And in the process of answering this question, as we analyze our
body we find that we are made of molecules (implying as we say this all the elements,
relations and processes that the molecular space entails) in the same way that all material
entities that we distinguish as we do what we do. Moreover, as we observe the molecular
processes that constitute our individual existence we find that we are molecular autopoietic
systems, and that we do all that we do in the continuous realization of our being molecular
autopoietic systems (Maturana and Varela 1980).
We human beings find ourselves doing what we do in the moment that we reflect about
what we do, and as we reflect about how we do what we do, we find ourselves being
languaging human beings wanting to explain our living. We do not need any ontological
justification for our reflections, and, as a matter of fact, we find ourselves being the
epistemological fundament of what we do. As we observe our being, we find that the
answer to any question that we may ask about how do we do what we do, and about how do
we understand the worlds that we generate in our living, appears as we explain the
coherence of our living with the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the real-
ization of our living while we show that the realization of our living as molecular
autopoietic systems constitutes the epistemological operational fundament of all our
doings, all our explaining, and of all our understanding.
Footnote 3 continued
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.
123
1.2 Systemic Laws
When we speak of systemic laws (Maturana and Dávila 2008), we speak of abstractions
that we make as multisensory observers4 of the coherences and regularities that appear in
what we do as we explain the coherences and regularities of what we do as molecular
autopoietic systems with the sensorial–operational–relational coherences and regularities
of what we do as we realize our living as molecular autopoietic systems. Accordingly, the
systemic laws, as all that we call laws of nature, are not descriptions of what should
happen, but are abstractions of the sensory–operational–relational regularities and coher-
ences of the realization of our living as molecular autopoietic systems.
1*-Conservation, change and transformation Whenever in a collection of elements a
configuration of relations begins to be conserved, a space opens for everything else to
change and transform around the configuration of relations being conserved. When this
happens an operational entity arises that will last conserving its identity as long as the
configuration of relations that defines it is conserved, regardless of any transformation or
changes that might otherwise have or may be taking place in it or around it.
2*-Structural determinism Everything that we human beings distinguish as we operate
observing what we do, arises in our distinction as an entity, as a process, or as a
configuration of entities or processes constituted with features or characteristics that
appear determined by what we do as we distinguish it: Everything that we distinguish
operates and participates in what we do operating with the features or characteristics
with which they arise as we distinguished them. We refer to this fundamental feature of
the world or cosmos that arises as we explain what we do in the realization of our living
with what we do in the realization of our living, as structural determinism. Accordingly
we say that every entity, every process, every system operates according to its structural
constitution.
3*-Cosmic love relation The relation of operational coherence between whatever entity
happens to be distinguished by an observer, and that part of the medium that operates in
relation with it making it possible, and happens while it is realized and conserved, we
call the relation of cosmic love.
4*-Fundamental inertia Everything that is happening continuous happening unless some
other happening interferes with it, and the happenings change.
5*-Natural drift The natural drift (Maturana and Mpodozis 2000) of living beings in
general (organisms), and of human beings in particular, follows a path that arises
defined moment after moment by their sensoriality in what an observer sees as their
‘‘preferences or desires, dislikes or fears …’’ and that continuously results in that the
organism and its dynamic ecological niche change together congruently. The natural
drift is a process that the attentive observers can see that courses without alternatives,
finality or purpose; alternatives, finality and purpose are notions and distinctions that
pertain to the domain of the expectations or desires of the observer, and not to the
domain of the occurrence or operation of what happens in the course of the natural
drift.
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.
123
1.3 Existence,5 Reality and Fundamental Inertia
When we languaging human beings speak in our cultural present of reality, or say that
something is real, what we are saying is that we feel that the something that we distin-
guished had been there before we distinguished it, and that it occurs with independency of
whatever we may have done as we distinguished it. And as we say so, we also say that the
distinguished entity, whatever its kind, existed, had presence by itself, independently of
what we may have done as we distinguished it. Furthermore, in our cultural present the
expression ‘‘to exists’’ means that the something to which it is applied occurs or has
presence in the domain of our distinctions: to exists means to occur, to have presence. And
in our present cultural parlance we tend to equate reality with existence, as is shown by
questions such as: >Is that real? >Does that thing in fact exists?
Yet, as languaging human beings we also now know that we cannot claim that anything
has presence or exists by itself because we know that in the experience we do not know and
cannot know, due to our condition of structure determined systems, whether what we live
as valid at any instant we shall confirm it later as a perception or we shall invalidate it as an
illusion or as a mistake as we compare it with some other experience of which we choose
not to doubt (Maturana and Varela 1984). This is why in our daily living we frequently ask,
how do you know? And that this is so is not due to some insufficiency or failure of our
nervous system or of our sensory organs: we are biologically that way. In these circum-
stances, in this essay whenever we say that something exists or that has existence, we shall
mean that that something ‘‘has presence’’ or ‘‘that it occurs’’ as a result of what we do as
we distinguish it, and that it arises into existence with the characteristics with which it
arises determined by the operation of distinction with which we distinguished it, and,
therefore, that it does not occur with independency of what we do as we distinguish it.
Being that the case, in what follows we shall use the word existence to refer to the
condition of operational presence that arises with what we do in our distinctions and
naming, and that the entity, process, concept, or whatever we distinguish or talk about will
have presence, that is, it will exist, only as long as the conditions implied in the operation
of distinction with which we distinguished it as we talked about it, can be performed. We
call fundamental inertia the continued conservation of existence that holds as long as the
conditions of the operation of distinction that constitute what we may be distinguishing are
conserved. Once the observer makes a distinction in the realization of his or her living, that
which is distinguished arises into existence together with the dynamic matrix of the sen-
sory–operational–relational conditions that makes it to occur or possible. Accordingly, as
we acknowledge that we exist as molecular autopoietic beings we acknowledge that
whatever we say as reflexive languaging human living beings, we say it talking from our
implicit or explicit understanding and acceptance of our operation as structurally deter-
mined molecular autopoietic beings. And we do so also in the implicit understanding and
acceptance that we operate in the domain of the fundamental inertia in which happens all
that happens in the cosmos that arises as we explain the operational coherences of the
realization of our living with the operational coherences of the realization of our living as
molecular autopoietic beings.
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 char-
acteristics 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.
123
In other words, what we are saying, and which is all that we can say, is that as a living
being arose spontaneously in the remote past of our planet at the same time arose with it,
and generated by it, the individual dynamic ecological niche that both nested it, making
possible its existence and conservation as a molecular autopoietic system, and constituted
with it the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity as the initial fundament of the evo-
lutionary history of living beings. Or more explicitly, we are claiming two basic things:
one, that what begun in the origin of living systems as autonomous discrete entities, was
the existence of living beings as dynamic ecological organism-niche unities; and two, that
what has occurred since then in the evolutionary history of the natural drift of living beings
has been the uninterrupted conservation and diversification of lineages of different dynamic
ecological organism-niche unities under the form of different manners of living.
Perhaps what is most uncanny although not unexpected in these circumstances, is that
the cosmos that arises with all that we do, all that we live and all that we distinguish as
languaging human beings, happens in our operation as such in the closed dynamics of our
realization as molecular autopoietic systems in the dynamic ecological organism-niche
unity that we integrate. All that happens in our living, all that we do as we live, arises and
occurs as entities, processes and configurations of entities and processes that are coherent
with whatever transformation we make in our operation in the molecular domain that arises
as we distinguish ourselves as molecular autopoietic systems, and we feel that molecules
occur as if they existed independently of what we do, even though we know through what
we do that they are not because they arise with what we do as we distinguish them.
Furthermore, all that we live occurs as a spontaneous result of the operation of all that
happens in the fundamental inertia and structural determinism that appears as the possi-
bility of the existence of all that we distinguish and do as we generate the cosmos that we
live as we explain the sensory–operational–relational coherences of our living with the
sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living in the closed
dynamics of the ecological organism-unity in which we realize our living as molecular
autopoietic systems. We human beings living in the dynamic ecological organism-niche
unity that we integrate as we live together are the epistemological condition of possibility
of all that occurs and may occur in the cosmos that we generate in our living as we explain
the coherences of our living with the coherences of the realization of our living. In these
circumstances the greatest vital danger that we human beings face in our collective living
as humanity, is the ecological disharmony that arises in the anthroposphere-biosphere unity
that we generate in our living when we do not understand and accept the fact that it is us
who give rise to the worlds that we live as cultural–biological human beings.
1.4 Dynamic Ecological Organism-Niche Unity
In biology when an observer distinguishes a single living being or a collection of living

beings constituting together a single larger living being or a collection of living beings
operating together as a totality, he or she speaks either of organisms, of colonies, of
communities, or of ecological systems, depending on the intimacy that he or she sees in the
closeness of the interrelation of the individual living beings. In fundamental terms, biol-
ogists speak of organisms when they refer to a single cell or to a closely spatially inter-
connected group of cells that operate as a single totality, and they speak of a colony, of a
community, or of an ecological system as they refer to their distinction of the manner of
their interdependent operation as a totalities as they constitute what appears to be a loosely
interconnected collection or group of otherwise apparently independent autonomous
organisms.
123
An observer that observes an organism in the realization of its living, and distinguishes
it existing in a domain of events, entities and processes, that extend far beyond the area
which appears to him or her to be its surrounding circumstances, he or she usually calls that
more extended area that appears to him or her containing it, the medium in which the
organism exists. Furthermore, the observer also sees that the organism lives only while the
flow of its interactions with the medium, that he or she sees contains it, happens to operate
as an ambience adequate for the continuous realization of its molecular autopoiesis as a
whole. We have been calling that part of the medium in which the observer sees that an
organism is continuously encountering itself in spontaneous sensorial, operational and
relational harmony so that it lives, its dynamic ecological niche. In fact, any entity that we
distinguish as we operate as observers arises in our operation of distinction implying the
sensory–operational–relational matrix in which its existence is possible. The relation with
the medium that makes possible the dynamic ecological organism-niche, in which an
organism exists, is what we have called ‘‘cosmic love relation’’ and lasts only as long as the
conditions of the fundamental inertia apply as it is apparent in the conservation of the
living of the organism. As we have just said, in the domain of living beings we refer to this
saying that all living beings and all systems of living beings exist only if the cosmic love
relation is conserved in their recursive encounters in the medium that makes possible the
arising of their dynamic ecological niche.
The dynamic ecological niche in which a living system realizes its living as an
organism, arises with the organism as this interacts with the medium that contains it
following a path that is moment by moment generated by the operation of its sensoriality as
the path in which its living results being conserved, whatever the nature of the sensory–
operational–relational domain in which it operates according to the realization of its
molecular autopoiesis. The organism and the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity
that arises with it, constitute together the ecological organism-niche operational unity
(dynamic ecological organism-niche unity) that the organism integrates as the manner of
living in which it realizes its molecular autopoiesis. The dynamic ecological organism-
niche unity thus constitutes what an observer sees as the manner of living that is conserved
generation after generation in the constitution and conservation of a lineage6 through
systemic reproduction. In us human beings that dynamic ecological organism-niche unity
is our biological–cultural existence.
What an observer distinguishes as the particular part of the medium in which he or she
finds that an organism exists realizing its living, appears in his or her distinction as a
domain of entities and processes that has its own operational dynamics independent of the
operational dynamics of the organism. The operational dynamics of the medium is dis-
tinguishable from the operational dynamics of the organism in that the latter appears in the
interaction as arising from a dynamic operational boundary generated by the continuous
closed realization of the organism’s molecular autopoiesis. As a result the sensory–oper-
ational–relational dynamics of the organism and the sensory–operational–relational
dynamics of its ecological niche as this arises in the medium that the observer sees
containing them, modulate each other’s structural dynamics through the recursive inter-
actions of their respective components as they operate in structural interactions in an
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.
123
operational–relational dynamics in which they conserve their respective independent

identities. Accordingly, what an observer distinguishes as he or she distinguishes an
organism is that the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity in which the organism
realizes its molecular autopoiesis does not preexist to the organism that lives it because it
arises with the living of the organism. In this process the observer also sees that the
dynamic ecological organism-niche unity continuously arises moment after moment de
novo at the tangent encounter of the organism with the medium, following moment after
moment the path in which its molecular autopoiesis is conserved guided by its multi-
sensoriality in the conservation of its sensory well-being.
When an observer distinguishes an entity or process, what defines it in its singularity is
the configuration of relations that is implied by the operation of distinction performed by
him or her or implied by his or her naming it. So, there is no operational confusion in the
operation of the different processes or structural dynamic entities involved in the contin-
uous transformation of the ecological organism-niche unity while the molecular autopoi-
esis of the organism is conserved.
1.5 Domains of Existence of Living Beings
Living occurs as the continuous realization of the molecular autopoiesis of the molecular
autopoietic systems. Living beings exist as molecular autopoietic systems in the domain of
their internal dynamics, and exist as well as organisms as they operate as totalities
recursively interacting and relating as discrete entities in the interactional and relational
domain that an observer sees arising with them as their dynamic ecological niche as they
realize their living. This process lasts while the living being operates as an organism in its
ecological niche interchanging molecules and energy with it as they mutually trigger in
each other structural changes in a process in which they undergo recursive congruent
structural changes that lasts while the organizational identity of the organism is conserved.
An observer of these recursive interactional sensory–operational–relational processes can
see that each living being may realize successively or simultaneously several different
manners of living as different sensory–relational–operational dynamics that occur as dif-
ferent manners of realization of its molecular autopoiesis through the same body-hood
along its ontogeny. It is the observer that sees these different manners of operation of an
organism along its ontogeny as several not intersecting sensory–operational–relational
domains, who must not confuse them as he or she attempts to understand all the trans-
formations that occur along the living of every living being. Moreover, the flow of the
relational dynamics that occurs in the realization of the living of an organism in its
recursive interactions in its ecological niche, change continuously according to the
structural changes that each one is undergoing as a result of their encounters and of their
respective independent operational dynamics; and this occurs through the continuous
realization of the manner of living of the organism that is taking place in the dynamic
ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates with its ecological niche. Furthermore,
this process of recursive coherent structural transformation of the organism and its dynamic
ecological niche lasts as long as the molecular autopoiesis of the organism is conserved.
This means, that all sensory–operational–relational aspects of what is occurring in the
different dimensions of the realization of the different manners of living that the different
kinds of dynamic ecological organism-niche unities that an organism may live, are for
different organisms different aspects of the dynamic ecological niche that they live in their
ontogeny. And this is so regardless of how strange they may appear to an observer, because
all of them occur as different forms or manners of living that are being conserved as
123
different lineages through the systemic reproduction of the different dynamic ecological
organism-niche unities that they integrate while their living is conserved. In these cir-
cumstances an observer may find him or herself distinguishing different concrete and
abstract forms of manners of living that occur as different forms or manners of behaving
that may go from what appears to him or her as unconscious configurations of inner
feelings to conscious and unconscious behaviors that arise through reflection or theoretical
philosophical, scientific or artistic behaviors in the case of human beings. All these dif-
ferent relational dynamics that occur as different forms or manners of the realization of the
ecological organism-niche unity in the realization of the molecular autopoiesis of an
organism, to an observer appears as different structurally intersecting but independent
domains of existence. Moreover, each one of the different domains of existence that
different living systems live, constitute as it is being lived all that there is for the living
system that lives it: each living being, whatever its kind, and whatever may be happening to
it or with it in its living, lives as valid all that it lives in the moment that it lives it.
1.6 Dynamic Ecological Niche
As we have said a living being lives as an organism only as long as it encounters itself in
sensory–operational–relational coherence with its ecological niche, or, what is the same, it
lives in the conservation of its relation of adaptation to the circumstances of its living in the
flow of the continuous realization of its molecular autopoiesis, or it disintegrates and
something else appears instead in front of the observer. In these circumstances the different
sensorial, operational and relational dimensions of the dynamic ecological niche that the
different kinds of living beings live, constitute different manners of living as different
worlds or domains of existence that occur as different domains of sensory–operational–
relational processes that they inhabit in the realization of their molecular autopoiesis. All
these different worlds or domains of existence intersect in their realization in the body-
hood of the organism as this realizes its molecular autopoiesis, but as different domains of
existence they consist in different not intersecting domains of sensory–operational–rela-
tional processes, each defined by the particular configuration of the dynamic architecture
that constitutes it as a distinct manner of living.
Yet, there is one fundamental kind of sensory–operational–relations that all organisms
generate in the realization of their living that under the form of different configurations of
dynamic relations define, moment after moment, their different manners of relating with
other living beings in all the different worlds that they live, and that we as observers
usually call emotions. Furthermore, all these different configurations of sensory–opera-
tional–relational processes constitute different aspects of the dynamic ecological niche that
arises with each organism as it interacts at its dynamic multi-sensory, multi-operational,
and multi-relational surfaces with the medium in which it exists, and in which its dynamic
ecological niche arises anew continuously. The dynamic ecological niche has no fix
extension or boundary, precisely because it exists only as it is happening as the dynamic
sensorial–operational–relational domain that arises anew as the organism encounters
moment after moment the dynamic part of the medium7 in which it conserves the dynamic
well-being of the realization of its molecular autopoiesis. That is, either the recursive
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.
123
interactions of the organism with the medium result in the continuous arising of its eco-
logical niche through the continuous realization of its molecular autopoiesis as a conse-
quence of the operation of the sensory-effectors correlations that it generates at its sensory–
relational–operational-boundary, or it disintegrates. Or, said in a somewhat different
manner, an organism lives only in the conservation moment after moment of its well-being
as it operates as a totality in the continuous arising of its always new dynamic ecological
niche through the recursive interplay of its sensoriality with it, or it dies disappearing with
its niche.
The domain of existence of the observer occurs in its observing (Maturana 1990) as it
arises distinguishing him or herself in self-distinction as a person with all that arises as she
or he reflects about what she or he does and reflect, in the realization of his or her living in
language (languaging). In these circumstances, all that an observer does in his or her
living, regardless of whether this occurs in what he or she may call his or her concrete or
abstract sensory–operational–relational existence as a human being, constitutes his or her
dynamic ecological niche in his or her realization as a molecular autopoietic system.
1.7 Different Manners of Living: Different Dynamic Ecological Niches
The dynamic ecological niche of an organism includes everything that an observer may see
as if in its operation were external to it, and that he or she sees that is triggering in the
organism structural changes that alter its operation as a totality in its relational space wile it
follows a path of structural transformation that courses in the conservation of the con-
tinuous realization of its molecular autopoiesis. The main result of this is that the observer
that makes these distinctions sees that the organism and its dynamic ecological niche
change together congruently as an operationally integrated harmonious dynamic ecological
organism-niche unity in which its ontogenic phenotype8 (Maturana and Mpodozis 2000)
becomes its manner of living which is as such the whole world that the organism lives in its
individual life. When some particular variation in the realization of a dynamic ecological
organism-niche unity begins to be conserved from one generation to the next as a new
dynamic ontogenic phenotype through the dynamics of systemic reproduction, a new
lineage arises as a new world defined by the new manner of living that is being conserved:
the manner of living that constitutes the dynamic ontogenic phenotype of an organism
determines all that may happen to it at any moment in the continuous changing present of
the realization of the living of the organism that lives it.
The systemic reproduction of an organism conserves its manner of living in the form of
an ontogenic phenotype that as a dynamic ecological organism-niche unity operates as a
dynamic spatiotemporal network of harmonic sensory–operational–relational coherent
processes interrelated in the form of a dynamic architecture through the realization of its
individual living. Whatever structural elements and relational processes happen to be
conserved in the systemic reproduction of an ecological organism-niche unity are aspects
of its realization. An observer of the sensory–operational–relational dynamics of some
organisms, whose dynamic ecological niches intersect, may see that all the organisms that
have intersecting ecological niches behave as if each one of them could anticipate what the
others will do in the flow of the different sensory–operational–relational processes that take
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.
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place in the different circumstances in which find themselves living together. Moreover
and in general terms, if the observer attends to the interactions of one organism with
another living being with which it has had some history of interactions, he or she will see
that the observed organism behaves as if it knew the inner feelings of that other living
being in the moment and place in which they encounter. In our living together in our
cultural present when we observe the coherent behaviors resulting from such unexpected
apparent foresights, we speak of inter-subjectivity, implying some direct mental or psychic
manner of interaction that cannot occur. But what happens is that when we live together
our dynamic ecological niches intersect and we generate an operational domain of inter-
objectivity (Maturana 2005).
As we have said, the ecological niche is a dynamic operational entity that exists only in
an operational relation with an organism. The dynamic ecological niche exists as every-
thing that operates as if it were external to the organism, arising as all that interacts with its
components at its sensory–operational–relational surface which itself arises as an opera-
tional boundary in the conservation of the organization of the organism through the
realization of its manner of living. In these circumstances, when an observer speaks of the
ecological niche that arises in the realization of the living of an organism, he or she is
connoting all the processes that he or she happens to distinguish as affecting its operation
while it conserves the manner of living that constitutes its individual identity as it lives it.
The ecological niche appears to the observer as having what he or she may call concrete
and abstract dimensions. That which the observer of human beings may call concrete
dimensions appear as operations that he or she may say that take place as physical
interactions such as manipulative acts or behaviors, and those that he or she may call
abstract dimension are those that he or she may say that correspond to operations such as
ideas, concepts, theories and spiritual and aesthetic believes, preferences or experiences
that modulate the relational space in which the others occur. As everything that happens or
may happen in the operation of an organism occurs in and through the realization of its
dynamic architecture in the realization of its molecular autopoiesis, that which we as
observers call abstract dimensions in our operation as languaging human being occur as
reflective abstractions that we make of our relational and interactional behavior as we
operate as languaging and reflective beings in the course of our realization as molecular
autopoietic systems.
1.8 How Do We Human Beings Exist?
All living beings exist in their operation as dynamic ontogenic entities, that is, they exist in
their individual realization as molecular autopoietic systems integrating a dynamic eco-
logical organism-niche unity. A lineage exists as a historical entity occurring as a suc-
cession of systemically reproduced manner of living ontogenic phenotypes. When an
observer distinguishes an organism what matters for him or her is what he or she sees that
is happening to it in its individual realization in its dynamic ecological niche, and when an
observer distinguishes a lineage, what matters for him or her is what he or she sees that is
conserved in the systemic reproduction of its manner of living. We human beings as
languaging living beings are peculiar in the sense that we can reflect, and do reflect, about
our individual living and about the worlds that we generate alone or with others in com-
munities constituted as networks of conversations. That is, we human beings exist as
persons, as reflective beings in self-awareness, realizing our ontogenic living in dynamic
ecological organism-niche unities that occur as a manners of social and not social networks
of conversations sustained by emotional and rational relations, continuously generating
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theories with which we explain how we live and justify what we do and what we do not do
(Maturana and Dávila 2008).
1.9 Molecular Domain: Operational Fundament of Everything
As we distinguish ourselves through our operations of distinctions, we find ourselves

through our operation as molecular autopoietic systems to be composed of molecules. The
molecular domain appears as the grounding domain of all that we do in our existing as
languaging and reflecting human living beings. And in our curiosity one of the things that
we recursively do is to analyze what we distinguish; thus we analyze molecules finding that
they arise as composite entities, and then we analyze the components that appear as we
analyze molecules and we find them composed of other elements and their relations, and
then we analyze … and so on into what appears as the unending domain of quantum
physic. In each of the new steps of our analysis new operational relational domains appear
defined by unexpected operational–relational coherences that can be studied with our
operation in the realization of our molecular autopoiesis, but cannot be reduced to them.
Something similar happens when we study the domains that arise with the composition of
supra molecular entities and new domains arise with unexpected features that have their
own operational–relational coherences. But in this process we find as observers that the
only domain in which the phenomenon of autopoiesis occurs as a network of interacting
elements that through their interactions generate elements of their same class that through
their recursive interactions generate the same network of components and processes that
produced them giving rise to the autonomous self-producing entities that are the living
beings, is the molecular domain. The fact that the molecular domain arises as our domain
of existence as we distinguish ourselves as molecular autopoietic systems, shows that we
languaging reflective human living beings operate doing whatever we do through the
continuous realization of our living as molecular autopoietic systems.
The molecular domain that arises as we analyze the sensory–operational–relational
coherences and our own constitution as living beings, and find that we are molecular
autopoietic systems, shows us that although we cannot speak of molecules as if they
existed in themselves in some transcendental reality, our understanding of operational–
relational coherences of the molecular domain in which we exist, opens us the path to see
and understand the cosmos that arises as we explain the operational–relational coherences
of the realization of our living with what we do with the operational–relational coherences
of the realization of our living. Whatever we do, think or imagine in the realization of our
living occurs as an operational relational doing in the realization of our living in the
molecular operational–relational of the realization as molecular autopoietic systems.
Whatever we may do as reflective languaging human beings Homo sapiens-amans amans,
we do it in the realization of our molecular autopoiesis in the molecular domain while our
soul is our human ecological niche.
Therefore, the effective difference of the different things that we do is not in what we
do, not in the thingness, materiality or form of the acts of doing, but in the relational space
in which they takes place in our individual living. In the flow of our living and in the flow
of the networks of conversations in which we participate as individual persons, our rela-
tional living in the ecological organism-niche unity that we integrate is continuously
changing in a manner that is not necessarily always apparent to the observer. And they are
not necessarily apparent to him or her because they occur in our inner feelings (Maturana
and Dávila 2008) in the continuous present in which we live our living. In these cir-
cumstances, the meaning or the sense of what a person does always appears to the observer
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that beholds her as abstraction of the coherences of what that person appears to him/her to
be doing. So, the same doings (behavior) participate in different flows of coordinations of
feelings, doings and emotions according to the relational domain in which they take place
in the ecological organism-niche unity in which the observed person is acting. A philo-
sophical conversation occurs in an abstract domain for an observer that does not participate
in it, but in the concreteness of the doings in the domain of the doings that it evokes in
those that do so.
All that happens in our living as languaging human beings, it happens in the domain of
the recursive coordinations of the inner feelings, the doings and the emotions that we
coordinate in our languaging as we operate in conversations and reflections. That is, all that
occurs through our conversations occurs in the concreteness of the doings that our lan-
guaging coordinates (Maturana 1978). The concreteness of a doings pertains to the domain
of the sensory-effectors correlations in which it occurs in the doings of the person in the
conversation in which she is immersed. So, if the person is immersed in a philosophical
conversation the doings coordinated have the concreteness of the doings that take place in a
philosophical conversation. If the philosophical conversation is about ethics, the doings
coordinated will be those proper to the domain of ethical relations.
1.10 Natural Drift
The evolution of living systems occurs as a process of generation and conservation of

different lineages of different manners of living through the systemic reproduction9 of the
dynamic ontogenic ecological organism-niche unity in which each living system realizes
its molecular autopoiesis. Whenever a variation in the manner of realization of the living
of some member of a lineage begins to be conserved as a new form of dynamic ecological
ontogenic organism-niche unity through its systemic reproduction, a new lineage arises.
We call this process of generation and conservation of new lineages of new manners of
living as dynamic ecological organism-niche unities through systemic reproduction, evo-
lution through natural drift. Therefore, in the process of evolutionary natural drift the
systemic reproduction the molecular autopoiesis of an organism entails that the dynamic
ecological organism-niche unity in which this exists, is conserved as a systemic totality.
The evolutionary natural drift does not occur as a probabilistic or aleatory dynamics, it
occurs as a deterministic process guided moment after moment by the operation of the
sensoriality of the organisms when such operation results in the continuous realization of
its molecular autopoiesis through the conservation of its well-being. There is no aim for a
result, no foresight, no purpose, no intentionality, in this process. The organism moves in
its living in an operational–relational space defined by its sensory and effectors surfaces,
and slides in its recursive interactions with the medium continuously following a path
generated anew at ever instant by the operation of its sensoriality. If in the flow of these
interactions the organism conserves its molecular autopoiesis its ecological niche is con-
served, and the organism continues realizing its molecular autopoiesis in it. If in the
recursive interactions of the organism in the medium its ecological niche is not conserved,
either as a result of some structural change triggered in the medium by the organism, or as
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-Romesı́n 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.
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a result of the independent structural dynamics of the medium, the organism disintegrate
and dies.
In evolutionary natural drift the arising, diversification and extinction of lineages occurs
as a result of the spontaneous conservation or not conservation of new or old manners of
living through the sequential systemic reproduction of particular dynamic ecological or-
ganism-unities as their dynamic architecture is realized in an independently changing
medium. And this happens without the participation of any metaphysical mechanism of
biological advantage as the organisms slide in the medium following the different path that
arise moment after moment according to the play of their sensoriality in the locality of their
encounters with the medium in which they realize their individual manners of operating as
molecular autopoietic beings. When in this process the dynamic ecological niche arises in
which the organisms undergo systemic reproduction, an old lineage is conserved or a new
one arises, depending of what is being conserved in the systemic reproduction. If the
dynamic ecological niche in which the particular manner of living of an organism could
undergo systemic reproduction does not arise, the manner of living of that organism is not
conserved and its lineage comes to end. Notions of improvement, progress, perfection,
efficiency or of comparative advantage, belong to the domain of the cultural living of the
observer, and no matter how comfortable their use may seem, they do not apply in the
domain of the processes that occur in the cosmos that arises as we explain the coherences
of the realization of our living as molecular autopoietic systems with the coherences of the
realization of our living as molecular autopoietic systems: ‘‘Nothing that occurs in the
operation of the cosmos in which we exist as molecular autopoietic beings occurs because
its occurrence, or the results of its occurrence, were necessary for its occurrence in any
happening that takes place outside the domain of human design’’.
The cosmos that arises as we explain our living with the sensory–operational–relational
coherences of the realization of our living is not chaotic, not probabilistic or stochastic in
its own operational nature, these notions refer to our ignorance or incapacity of making
computations in some particular domains because we have not been able of abstracting the
basic configuration of sensory, operational and relational coherences that define the sen-
sory–operational–relational matrix that constitutes that domain. Natural drift is the spon-
taneous historical manner in which all processes occur in the cosmos that arises as we
explain the sensory–operational–relational coherences of our living with the sensory–
operational–relational coherences of our living.
1.11 Where Do We Exit as Reflective Observers?
A living being exists in the sensory–operational–relational domain that it integrates as the

dynamic ecological organism-niche unity in which it realizes its living. Therefore, the
dynamic ecological niche of an organism involves all the concrete and abstract dimensions
of its manner of living. The manner of living of an organism is its dynamic ecological
niche that is transforming with it along the epigenesis of its ontogeny. This is a recursive
process in which the basic structural dynamics (genetic determination) of the anatomy and
physiology of the organism together with the consensual (learned) variations that take
place in its epigenesis are conserved in the constitution of a lineage through the systemic
reproduction of the organisms that realize it.
Our human manner of living as languaging reflective beings constitutes our biological
and cultural existence as the dynamic ecological unity that is our biological–cultural niche
in which we recursively realize our molecular autopoiesis as reflective human beings. Our
reflective languaging manner of living as biological–cultural organisms is both our manner
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of living and our recursive dynamic ecological niche as the domain in which we describe
how we live, reflect on what we do, and in which we may reflect on what we do as we
reflect on what we do as we ask ourselves about whether we like what we say that we like.
Moreover, we reflective languaging human beings can live as persons that choose to live in
a relational dynamics that they choose to conserve open for new reflections, or as persons
that choose to live in dogmatic relations denying for themselves and others the possibility
of conserving the possibility of being always open to recursive reflective choices.
Whichever manner of living we choose to live as languaging reflective human beings, the
manner of living that we live is ourselves living the realization of the dynamic ecological
organism-niche unity that we are.
Whatever we do, think, imagine, understand, accept or reject … generates and conforms
at every instant our living and the path of living that we follow, as occurs with all living
systems in which whatever happens in them or with them constitutes ecological dynamic
organism-niche unite that is the realization of their living. We are not different from other
living beings in the realization of our living; what is peculiar to us is that we as cultural-
biological beings that live in conversations and reflections, are the only living beings on the
earth that can reflect on their own inner feelings and choose whether they want to do or do
not want to do what they claim that they want to do. In an operational way, living systems
exist in the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that they continuously generate and
integrate as they move in their living following a path that is being generated at every
moment through their sensoriality in the conservation of their wellbeing.
2 Part 2: How are We Made?
2.1 Dynamic Architectures (1)
As we speak of an organism we refer to its manner of constitution as a molecular

autopoietic system, and in doing so we are continuously connoting the dynamic manner of
disposition of its molecular components. So we wish to make a reflection about three
conceptual–operational notions that are basic for the understanding how we do exist as
human living beings that operate as reflective self-conscious persons. These conceptual–
operational notions are: structure, organization and dynamic architecture.
(a) When we human beings, as we operate as observers distinguish a composite entity,
we distinguish a totality in which we distinguish the components and the relations
between them that constitute it as the totality that we had distinguished. In this
distinction we speak of the structure of the composite entity when we refer to the
components and the relations between them that realize it as such totality as a particular
case of a particular class of composite entities. At the same time, when we speak of the
organization of the composite entity we refer to the configuration of the relations
between its components that define its class identity as a composite totality. In these
circumstances the structure of a composite entity can change in two ways: either in a
way in which the configuration of relations that constitutes the organization that defines
the class identity of the composite entity is conserved through those structural changes,
or in a way in which the configuration of relations that constitutes the organization of the
composite entity is not conserved through those structural changes. In the first case the
composite entity changes its characteristics but conserves its class identity; in the second
case as the configuration of relations that constitute the organization that defines the
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class identity of the composite entity is not conserved and it disintegrates, and as result
something else appears instead.
When in daily life we speak of the history of any give composite entity we refer to its
structural changes with conservation of its class identity that it may have undergo because
its organization has not changed (Maturana and Varela 1984). At the same time when we
as observers distinguish a composite unity and pay attention to the configuration or form of
the disposition of the elements that compose its structure we speak of its architecture, and
we can speak of dynamic or static architectures. So, when we speak of the dynamic or
static architecture of a composite entity we refer to the manner of its realization as a
composite entity in the sensory–operational–relational domain in which we distinguish it.
To do this allows us to see the transformation of the particular composite entity that we
may be distinguishing as the history of its continuously changing present in the sensory–
operational–relational domain in which it arises together with its dynamic ecological niche
as the dynamic architecture of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity in which it
exists. The understanding of the historical transformation of a dynamic composite entity
such as an ecological organism-niche unity as it happens as a dynamic architecture, permits
us to see that what seems to be structural interactions occurring between temporally and
spatially separated entities or processes that have been explained usually resorting to the
invention of metaphysical relations such as purpose, regulation, control, intentionality, and
progress, are not so. But appear to be so due the structural harmony that is continuously
arising in interacting systems from the structural coupling (Maturana and Varela 1984) and
historical correlations that happens in them in their natural drift as a result of their
occurring as interrelated dynamic architectures.
(b) That which must have happened when the first molecular autopoietic systems arose
on the earth, some three thousand eight hundred million years ago, must have been the
spontaneous arising of many molecular autopoietic systems that constituted as discrete
entities individual organisms integrated in the dynamic ecological niches that arose with
them and that as they were conserved initiated the natural structural drift of living
beings. And as those dynamic ecological organism-niche unities were conserved through
the continued realization of their molecular autopoiesis, they became the basic primary
dynamic architecture that constituted the beginning of the evolutionary drift of living
systems. Moreover, when these primitive organisms underwent some accidental fracture
that resulted in the arising of two or more molecular autopoietic systems with the
dynamic ecological niches that they integrated, reproduction occurred. Lastly, when
recursive reproduction begun to occur lineages arose, and with them the lineal path for
the reproductive conservation of the original or of variations of the original dynamic
architecture of the primitive living beings; and as this occurred a path of structural drift
was opened, giving rise to an unavoidable historical recursive increase of diversification
and complexity of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unities under successive
reproduction. The process of reproduction is operationally very simple as it occurs
whenever a composite unity undergoes a fracture in which its organization is conserved
in the realization of its resulting fragments. In these circumstances, in living systems
what is conserved in the reproductive process is the dynamic architecture of the dynamic
ecological organism-niche unity in which the reproducing living system realizes its
living.
As the dynamic architecture of an organism undergoes its individual ontogenic struc-
tural transformation, an observer can see that the organism and its ecological niche that
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arises with it change together congruently. Furthermore, the observer can also see that the
manner of relating of the organism with its niche and the manner of relating of the
organism-niche unity with the medium in which it occurs, also change together congru-
ently constituting a network of systemic dynamic architectures that change together fol-
lowing the path in which the configuration of the systemic dynamic configuration of the
realization of the molecular autopoiesis of each organism, is conserved. When the living of
an organism (its molecular autopoietic dynamics) stops being conserved and it dies, the
dynamic architecture of the system organism-niche-medium disintegrates. Indeed this
occurs in the individual history of the dynamic architecture of any dynamic composite
singularity that we may distinguish in the cosmos that arises as we explain the coherences
of our living with the coherences of the realization of our living.
(c) In our historical present, when an observer distinguishes a particular ‘‘stem cell’’,
such as a zygote in a sexually reproducing organisms, what he or she sees is a singular
dynamic architecture participating as a single cell organism in the initiation of the
constitution of a composite larger dynamic architecture with its ecological niche and the
medium in which it occurs as an initial dynamic configuration in a self-assembling
(spontaneous assembling) architectural process. And as the dynamic architecture of that
composite entity changes, what the observer sees is a history of transformation of the
composite entity in sensory, operational and relational dynamic structural congruence
with its changing ecological niche while it conserves its identity as a composite unity.
This process is relatively easy to see if oneself is attentive to observe what happens in a
pregnant woman, as it is now days possible to follow the transformation of the embryo in
the uterus, and one observes that it occurs as a process in which every change in the
embryo occurs in coherent dynamic congruence with the changes of the uterus, of the
mother, of the family niche, and that it dies when that dynamic coherent congruence
does not take place.
At first sight what happens in the embryonic development appears to the observer as a
process that goes to a pre-established end that has a complexity that appears inexplicable
without the operation of some metaphysical organizing principles such as intentionality,
purpose or implicit design. Now days we biologists would not generally accept explicitly
such metaphysical organizing principles, but they appear hidden in notions of coding and
information which do not describe the molecular processes involved and replace them with
equally metaphysical notions such as control and regulation(Maturana 2007, 1974). Yet, if
we consider that what we see that is happening at every instant spontaneously in the
process of the embryonic development, is only a moment of the present of a history of
structural transformations of an interrelated system of dynamic architectures, we can
understand that what we see happening with the organism and its niche is the local
operation of a dynamic network of structural coherences that arose in a history of structural
coupling in the evolutionary drift of a network of lineages of living entities that began
millions of years earlier in the reproductive conservation of variations in the manner of
realization of the molecular autopoiesis of the members of the of some original network of
lineages. As the natural drift of different lineages of organism began to take place in some
geographical place that contained them, the structural changes conserved in the members
of each lineage were only those in which the dynamic of the molecular autopoiesis of the
different reproducing organisms of the different lineages was conserved in the common
dynamic ecological niche that arose in their domain of coexistence, regardless of the form
that was taking the increasing historical structural complexity of the ecological organism-
niche unity in which their respective manners of living were realized. As all this begun to
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happen some three thousand eight thousand million years ago, the evolutionary history of
the biosphere begun as a grand system of interrelated different manners of living that
occurred as different dynamic ecological organisms-niche unities that occurred as inter-
related systems of dynamic architectures. The history of the network of lineages of living
beings that constitutes the biosphere has occurred and occurs as a process of structural drift
in which the different lineages follow the path that arises in the contingencies of the
conservation of the living of its members, or comes to an end. This historical process of
structural change in which the lineages follow the path in which the living of their
members happen to be conserved according to their structural dynamic coherence with
ecological circumstances that arise with the conservation of their living, is what we have
called evolutionary drift.
The evolutionary drift of living systems has been from their beginning the history of the
arising and conservation of variation of the dynamic structural configuration that consti-
tuted the original dynamic architecture that realized the molecular autopoiesis together
with the structural variations that realized and conserved through systemic reproduction the
dynamic ecological organism-niche unity of the manner of living of the first organisms
without the participation of any metaphysical principle of purpose, control, design, or
regulation. Once that dynamic architecture appeared, and begun to be conserved through
systemic reproduction, biological evolution became a historical process that spontaneously
generated different stem cells (mother cell in Spanish) with dynamic architectures that
realized different manners of living as a process that did not need, as we have just said, of
the participation of any metaphysical organizing principle like control, design, planning,
intentionality, purpose or coding and decoding of information to occur. No doubt that in
the present we speak of genetic determination and coding of information, and we think that
we understand what is occurring because we can do some measure of manipulations that
seems to be biologically effective according to the way we describe what we think that is
happening, but in fact we blind ourselves about the molecular processes involved as they
occur without any ‘‘concern’’ about the result of their occurrence. We can see, for example,
that if something particular happens in the relation of the stem cell with its ecological niche
its architectural transformation goes in one direction, and that if something else happens it
goes in another direction. We can say that different regulatory genes were activated in the
two cases, and that one controlled the process in a way in which it went in one direction,
and that the other in other did something different so that there are two path of control …
but let us see the dynamic molecular architecture that might have been involved as
spontaneous self-assembling processes.
(d) At some moment along the initial continuous spontaneous arising of the primeval
bacteria as discrete entities, all this in the midst of molecular mixing and transforming,
RNA first and much later DNA nucleic acids, must have been incorporated as part of the
dynamics of the realization and conservation of their molecular autopoiesis. As that
happened the ontogenic and phylogenic natural drift of the primeval bacteria must have
followed a path in which the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that they
integrated was transforming around the conservation of the molecular architecture that
realized them as molecular autopoietic systems that operated as dynamic ecological
stem cell-niche unities in their systemic reproductive dynamics including some of those
molecules. When some primeval bacterium became a dynamic ecological stem-cell-
niche unity (stem-cell-niche unity) as it divided in a way in which another bacterium
similar to it appeared together with its ecological niche, a lineage arose in the initiation
of the systemic reproductive conservation of that bacterial form of living under the form
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of a dynamic ecological organism-niche unity. Moreover, as that reproductive manner of

living happened, each variation in the stem-cell-niche unity that appeared in the natural
drift of the bacterial lineages became the fundament for the arising and the systemic
reproductive conservation of further variations in the stem-cell-niche unity manner of
living, giving rise to a process of systemic reproductive conservation of stem-cell-niche
unities that became the fundament for the generation of many different forms of living
in the arising biosphere.
The evolutionary history of living beings has occurred as the history of the natural drift
of the systemic reproductive generation and conservation of different lineages of stem-cell-
niche unities whose different dynamic architectures could each realize in its individual
manner of living its respective particular dynamic ecological organisms-niche unity as its
individual molecular autopoiesis, and its individual ontogeny as its particular dynamic
ecological organism-niche unity. >What is the participation of nucleic acids in all this?
The DNA is a linear molecule composed as a chain of different combinations of four
different small ones (nucleotides) that operates in determining with the participation of
RNA molecules in the synthesis of polypeptides and proteins determining the sequence of
the amino acids that constitute them. It is this peculiar manner of operation of the DNA and
RNA what has lead us biologists think that we can claim that the DNA codifies the
synthesis of proteins and what happens in the organism because ‘‘it contains the infor-
mation’’ that properly de-codified tells the organism what to do. This is a good description
in a semantic domain, but obscures what happens in the process of the continuous oper-
ation of the dynamic architecture of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity in which
the living of the organism occurs in its ontogeny. But, let us see.
In the continuous changing present in which living systems live as networks of cyclical
processes intertwined with linear ones in their continuous realization as molecular
autopoietic systems, the linear processes participate in the sequential (temporal) occurring
of those processes as they arise as transformations of the previous ones in a historical
dynamics. A dynamic architecture is a historical process of structural change and trans-
formation of a composite entity of some kind around the conservation of its operation.
Ontogeny is the dynamic architecture of the continuous transformation and change of the
realization of the individual organism-niche ecological unity. As such the ontogeny is a
lineal process, and it is as an element of that linearity that the DNA macro molecules
operates determining moment after moment what kinds of processes and molecules of the
organism or of the ecological niche, participate at any moment in the processes that take
place in the realization of the living of the organism in the niche that arises with it. That is,
the DNA through its lineal arrangement participates in the sequential timing of the acti-
vation and inhibition of the processes of molecular synthesis, as well as what molecules are
synthesized and when in the contingencies of the continuously changing present of the
structural (molecular) configuration of the dynamic architecture of the dynamic ecological
organism-niche unity that the organism integrates at any moment.
When a primeval molecular autopoietic system and its ecological niche undergoes a
division that results in two primeval molecular autopoietic systems in their respective
ecological niches, a systemic reproductive process has taken place, and that primeval
‘‘bacterium’’ or ‘‘cell’’ and its ecological niche have become an ecological stem-cell niche
unity. And when that occurs, the further systemic reproduction of the dynamic architecture
of such primeval unity makes that primeval unity the founding ecological stem-cell-niche
unity of an arising lineage. The systemic reproduction of the dynamic architecture of an
ecological stem-cell-niche unity conserves simultaneously the molecular autopoiesis of the
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reproducing cell and the structural configuration of the new ecological cell-niche unity that
makes possible that it may operate as a systemically reproducing ecological stem-cell-
niche unity. Indeed, this must have happened at least with some primeval bacteria that as
they reproduced systemically gave origin to the ecological stem-cell-niche unities that gave
rise to several lineages of ecological stem cell-niche unities, one of which became that to
which we belong. The present day ecological stem-cell-niche unities are thus all the
present of a history of recursive transformation of the dynamic ecological architecture of
some primeval ecological stem cell-niche unities through the uninterrupted systemic
reproductive generation of millions of lineages.
In these circumstances it also happens that all that occurs with an organism is an aspect of
the present of the ontogenic changes of some ecological stem-cell-niche unity that is the
present of the uninterrupted history of the sequential systemic reproduction of dynamic
ecological stem-cell-niche unities in which the dynamic architecture of the stem-cells and
their ecological niches have been changing around the systemic reproductive conservation of
the molecular autopoiesis through the systemic reproductive conservation of the stem-cells
in their abilities to generate the dynamic architecture that gives rise to the ecological
organism-niche ontogeny that makes them possible as the fundament of the lineage of the
manner of living to which they belong. Along this process both the structure of the cytoplasm
of the stem-cells, the DNA and the ecological niche in which the organisms realize their
living have changed together congruently following the course followed by the natural drift
of the conservation of the lineages to which they belong. This is a historical process that has
occurred and occurs without design or aim to a desired end, it is a process that just occurs as a
continuous resulting that happens with no intentionality or purpose. In this historical process
the DNA does not operate codifying information about the different structures, processes or
functions of the organisms. The DNA operates in the continuous realization of the ever
changing present of the dynamic architecture of the ecological organism-niche unity through
its participation in the synthesis of different kinds of molecules and in the activation and
inhibition of relational and structural processes in some sequential order proper to the
epigenesis of the ontogeny of the organism that has arisen in the transformation of the
ecological stem-cell-niche unity as a result of the evolutionary drift of the lineage to which it
belongs. In this sensory, operational and relational structural dynamics that results moment
after moment in the sequential arising of the molecular processes that realize and conserve
moment after moment the operation of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity, the
DNA operates establishing moment after moment the sequential order of those processes.
This manner of operation of the DNA results in the continuous arising and conservation of
the molecular operational and relational configurations that realizes a stem-cell as an eco-
logical dynamic cellular architecture that gives origin to an ontogenic process that results in
some particular manner of living, which if it is conserved through systemic reproduction
results in the arising of a lineage of that particular form of living.10
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.
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In summary we can say and repeat that the evolution of living systems is the history of
the systemic reproductive conservation of variations of the form of operation of the
dynamic architecture of the dynamic ecological stem-cells-niche unities in a way in which
the changes in their dynamic ontogenic architecture gives rise to new manners of living
that become new lineages as they are conserved through their systemic reproduction. As
we observe a stem-cell, in the intent of seeing the manner how it is made in order to
discover how it operates, we soon find ourselves facing a complexity that is not easy to
understand in its present, nor how it arose in the evolutionary history through natural
selection. Yet we have shown that if we change our point of view and consider it having in
mind that evolution occurs as a process of arising and diversification of lineages through
natural phylogenic drift (Maturana and Mpodozis 2000), and that the realization of the
living of a living system happens as the transformation of the ecological organism-niche
unity as a dynamic architecture, things become more simple. At any instant of the hap-
pening of a dynamic architecture its present structural configuration is the starting point for
whatever may happen next as it determines what may happen next. In these circumstances
the order at which the epigenetic processes occur along the ontogeny of an organism
started by the activation of a stem cell, is determined at every instant by the architectural
configuration of the organism and the architectural configuration of its ecological niche at
that instant, with the particular ordering participation of the linear arrangement of the DNA
molecules and of the encounters of the organism in its ecological niche.
The initial structural arrangement of any ecological stem-cell niche unity of any lineage
of reproducing ecological organism-niche unities along the history of the biosphere (or was
in those lineages that became extinct), is the result of the history of architectural trans-
formation of the ecological stem-cell-niche unities in the evolutionary drift of the lineages
to which they have belonged, through their systemic reproduction with the simultaneous
conservation of both the molecular autopoiesis and the capacity of operating as an eco-
logical stem-cell-niche unity in the dynamic medium in which they happen to arise. And if
we ask about what occurs in the biosphere, we realize that the same process happens in the
network of lineages that constitute it as a network of dynamic intercrossing of dynamic
architectures in the intercrossing of the realization of the dynamic ecological organism-
niche unities of the living beings that compose it at any instant.
(e) The dynamic architecture of the ecological stem-cell-niche unity that initiates the
development of an embryo does not resemble the dynamic architecture of the grown
organism that will result from its transformation. Moreover it is not directly apparent
how the continuous transformation of the developing embryo occurs in the continuous
conservation of its molecular autopoiesis and the architectural arrangement of the
systemic reproduction of the ecological stem-cell-niche unities. Yet, since we know that
the embryonic process occurs as the transformation of the dynamic architecture of a
composite entity without any final purpose in it, we understand that we do not need
notions of control or regulation to explain how is that is taking place. Those notions
belong to the domain of our reflections as observers, and if we intend to apply them to
the structural dynamics of the developing embryo they become metaphysical principles.
The same happens with the notion of information coding in the nucleic acids: the
molecules of nucleic acids participate in the metabolism of the cell through their
participation in the synthesis of molecules through their interactions with other
molecules, in the network of the molecular dynamics of the self-assembling processes of
the metabolism. In these circumstances the use of notions that claim that in the nucleic
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acids is coded the information necessary for the operation of the cell gives to those
notions a metaphysical power that obscure their spontaneous self-assembling nature.
If we were to look at our personal history to recount it from our birth or even before it,
we would see that everything that we lived concatenated in a process that was bringing us
step by step to the present that we are now living … and yet, it was not so, we were not
coming to be where we are now, our present is a result, not the attainment of an objective
or aim. The result of a process does not participate in its origin.
2.2 Dynamic Architecture (2)
(a) When an observer distinguishes a composite entity11 as it operates as a totality, he or

she does so by distinguishing in it its components and the relations between them as they
realize it as the totality that he or she had originally distinguished. The components and
the relations between them that realize a composite entity as a totality are, its structure,
that is, the manner that it is made. And the configuration of relations between the
components of a composite entity that define its class identity is its organization
(Maturana and Varela 1984). The structure of a composite entity may be dynamic
changing continuously as occurs in living beings, and the entity conserves its class
identity while those changes occur with the conservation of its organization. When the
structure of a composite entity changes in a way that its organization as a composite
entity of a particular class is not conserved, the original composite entity disintegrates
and something else appears in its place. As an observer distinguishes the structure of a
composite unity looking at the static or dynamic relational disposition of its components
he or she distinguishes the static and/or dynamic architecture of the composite entity as
it arises in his or her distinction as a totality in the sensory–operational–relational space
in which he or she distinguishes it.
Things, processes, entities, relations … the observer itself … do not exist independently of
the operations of distinction that an observer performs as he or she distinguishes whatever
he or she distinguishes, even him or herself. We human beings find ourselves living beings
and we find ourselves operating as observers when we begin to distinguish ourselves doing
all that we do as we distinguish ourselves doing what we do. We feel ourselves living in a
world that contains us, but when we wish to talk about it we find ourselves immersed in
what we do. We feel that there should be a background of independent existence that
makes us possible, and sustains all that happens in our living as we do all that we do … all
that we seem to discover as we discover the universe or cosmos that seems to exist outside
us, but which whenever we talk about it or describe it, we describe and explain it with the
operational coherences of what we do. And we invent some kind of transcendental entity
that we call reality or the real. In fact, we cannot speak about something that transcends
what we do, but what we can say with our doings is not little. That is, we can say that all
that we distinguish either arises from some unspeakable nothingness as a new domain of
operational coherences in the realization of our living, or as some new aspect of some
particular domain of operational coherences about which we can speak because it belongs
to our daily experience in the realization of our living as languaging human beings. And we
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.
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can also say that everything that happens in the realization of our living happens according
to the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living, and
nothing that we distinguish arises from some chaotic process that is occurring intrinsically
outside the domain of the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of
our living. Not even the events of the domain of quantum physics are outside the domain of
the realization of our living to the extent that we can speak of them in terms of proba-
bilities, and make adequate computations about the course of their happening. And this is
so because a calculus of probabilities, or a computations using probabilistic notions, entails
that the domain in which we are making our computations is not chaotic and happens as a
domain of operational and relational regularities that we cannot describe (Maturana 1990),
but which constitutes anyhow the fundamental dynamic architecture in which all that we
distinguish with our doings occurs as an aspect of the realization of our living with what we
do in the realization of our living.
Accordingly, we can also say that when we distinguish a living being we distinguish it in its
operation as a molecular autopoietic system, and as we do so we find that everything that
happens in it or with it occurs in the continuous realization of its changing dynamic archi-
tecture as an aspect of the dynamic architecture of the dynamic ecological niche that arises
with it and constitutes with it a dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that exists as a
changing dynamic architecture in some dimension of what may happen in the operational–
relational domain implied by its existing as an autopoietic molecular systems. And we can
speak of these three conceptual–operational entities in terms of their individual identities as
organism, ecological niche and ecological organism-niche unity, in relation to what is
conserved in each of them as a particular structural dynamics while they operate as different
dynamic architectures that constitute together through their structural interactions the eco-
logical organism-niche unity that realizes the manner of living of the organism that is inte-
grated with it in the realization of its molecular autopoiesis. And all this is occurring
continuously in the continuously changing present in the sensory–operational–relational
domain in which we human beings exist as we do all that we do as molecular autopoietic
systems.
(b) The notions of architecture and dynamic architecture entail a vision of the processes
that generate, realize and conserve a particular dynamic composite entity as a particular
case of some particular kind in its changing present. The observing of how a changing
dynamic architecture operates as a human creation brings with it the possibility of
visualizing how processes that occur as historically separated independent happenings
appear to affect each other in particular temporally separated moments in the flow of the
continuously changing present in which the living of a living being is happening. And it
is in the attempt to explain how that happens in the coherent transformation of the
ontogeny of an organism in which temporally separated process seem to affect each
other what has lead us human in the long history of our reflections to invent
metaphysical notions of regulation, modulation, control, codification and de-codification
of information. The operating living being that we distinguish as observers occurs as a
historical present between a disappearing past and a not yet lived future, and what we
see as observer in the present of our observing it is only the continuous present of a
dynamic architecture in which there are structural changes without the operation of
relations of regulation or control; so that all what an observer sees is a transit of
structural changes in the realization of the living of a living being, and not its individual
form as a totality which occurs as a historical entity in a historical domain: The living
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being occurs as a historically changing present in the ‘‘cero time’’ of a historical entity
that exists as a changing dynamic architecture.
Thus, the expression ‘‘changing dynamic architecture’’ represents an abstraction of the
coherent flow of structural changes in the changing configuration of the dynamic coher-
ences of the processes that realize the living of a living being as a composite historical
totality, that occurs as a network of interconnected processes that appear in our experiences
as we observe them at different moments as disconnected happenings that seem to need the
operation of some special metaphysical agency that may integrate them in the realization
of the living organism in its ecological niche. And as we just said above it is in our attempt
to give coherence to such apparently disconnected happening in the realization of the living
of the organism that we have invent explanatory notions such as regulation, modulation
and control. We do not see an organism as a totality as we observe it in the moment of its
changing present; what we see at any moment is a sequence of some sort of ‘‘photo-
graphic’’ sections of its happening that we integrate as a discrete historical entity through
the combination of our multi-sensorial experiences as they arise in our continuous
observation of its changing present, or through our comparison of what we have seen to
happen in different organisms in different moments of their life history. If we were to take
a multidimensional picture of an organism that would show us the position and relations of
all the molecular elements that compose it as a molecular autopoietic system in a particular
instant, all that we would see is a static configuration, and not a molecular autopoietic
system. And we would not see a molecular autopoietic system because the molecular
autopoietic system exists as a molecular dynamic entity in the flow of its operation as a
continuously changing historical totality in its ecological niche.
(c) What we are saying is that the notion of a changing dynamic architecture applies to
the operation of an organism and its dynamic ecological niche individually as well as to
the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that they integrate when they live together
as a collective totality as they realize their individual living in their individual ecological
niches. And we are saying as well that the living of an organism occurs as the continuous
result of the operation of its ontogenic changing dynamic architecture as an individual
molecular autopoietic composite entity. Indeed, what we have said implies that all the
composite entities that may arise as we distinguish them, occur as dynamic architectures
of different kinds in different sensory–operational–relational domains according to the
nature of the components and of the relations that arise as their structure in the moment
in which we distinguish them.
Moreover, what is conserved in the natural drift of the different kinds of entities that we
bring forth with our operations of distinction as we explain the cosmos that arises with
what we do as we explain the sensory–operational–relational coherences of our living as
molecular autopoietic beings with the sensory–operational coherences of the realization of
our living as molecular autopoietic systems, are changing configurations of dynamic ar-
chitectures. The cosmos in which we live arises with our living it, and as we arise in it, it is
the extended dynamic changing medium in which arises the ecological niche in which we
exist in the ecological organism-niche unities as languaging reflective human beings that
generate the cosmos in which they live as they explain the sensory–operational–relational
coherences of their living with the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the
realization of their living (Maturana and Dávila 2015).
We human beings exist in a cognitive explanatory dynamics that as such is like a
Moebius circular ribbon with no beginning, no end, and no other side, and which is such
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that if we want to explain how it operates from some transcendental view we must destroy
it as we invent another side by cutting it from an arbitrary imaginary external perspective
as we stand on it.
2.3 Spontaneous Architectures
(a) Every spontaneous and not spontaneous architectural process in our molecular
domain of existence occur according the operational forms of the molecules involved as
this is determined by their dynamic structural coherences. Molecules and atoms interact
with each other like the pieces of a puzzle, fitting with each other according to their
congruent forms (energetic coherences) and they give rise to dynamic and static
molecular architectures. Accordingly, a molecular autopoietic system operates as such
as a dynamic architecture of dynamic configurations of energetic coherences. The
metabolism of a cell realizes its operation as a dynamic molecular architecture; the
dynamic ecological organism-niche unity happens as a systemic dynamic architecture,
the ontogeny of an organism happens as a systemic dynamic architecture integrated in
the multidimensional systemic dynamic architecture of the dynamic ecological niche
unity that it integrates as it realizes its living. A crystal occurs in principle as a static
architecture. In these circumstances, in the process of the arising of a dynamic archi-
tecture the forms of the molecules that at any instant are fitting together, determine what
molecular forms they may ‘‘admit’’ in their interactions; and this occurs in a way such
that the course of the processes in which the participating molecules participate is
determined at every instant by the dynamic form of the molecules that are already
participating in it. This dynamics is acknowledged in the expression self-assembly that is
used in cellular biology to refer to the spontaneous synthesis of some complex molecules
in the metabolic dynamic of the cell. In fact all that occurs in our domain of existence
occurs spontaneously as a self-assembling dynamic architecture. It is the self-assembling
nature of the dynamics of molecular and atomic processes what is at the base of the
historical conservative character of the evolutionary natural drift. The spontaneous
architecture in the natural drift of the cosmos that arises as we explain the sensory–
operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living in the dynamic eco-
logical organism-niche unity that we integrate with the sensory–operational–relational
coherences of the realization of our living, is what we human beings attempt to describe
and to understand as we want to explain and understand our living.
(b) We human beings explain the sensory–operational–relational coherences of our
living with the sensory–operational–relational coherences of our living, and as we do so
we are both historians and participants of the natural drift of the spontaneous dynamic
systemic architecture of the cosmos in which we happen to exist. Yes, we are historians
that at the same time realize the history that they reveal. The dynamic architecture of the
cosmos that arises as we describe and explain the operational and relational coherences
of the realization of our living with the operational and relational coherences of the
realization of our living has no design, no purpose, no intent… it just occurs as the
happening of a multi-dimensional and multi-spatial self-assembling ecological dynamics
of what occurs in the realization of our molecular autopoiesis.
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2.4 Ontogenic Architecture: From a Stem-Cell-Niche Unity on
(a) Order, harmony, form … are not features of the spontaneous dynamics of the cosmos
that arises as we explain the sensory–operational–relational coherences of our living
with the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living.
Order and disorder, harmony and disharmony, form and chaos, do not exist as opera-
tional features of the cosmos that arises as we explain the realization of our living with
the operational coherences of the realization of our living; they are notions that we
propose to refer to configurations of dynamic coherences that we abstract in its dynamics
in relation to the regularities that we distinguish in the realization of our living. All that
an observer can say about the cosmos that arises as he or she explains the coherences of
his or her living with the coherences of his or her living, is that it appears is a spon-
taneous dynamic systemic architecture of networks of processes that appeared to him or
her as he or she begun to say something about the world in which he or she lived, and
that until then he or she had been just living. Disorder appears as he or she displaces
things in a way such that operational well-being appears, or reappears if it had been lost,
disharmony appears as he or she changes things or processes in such a way that rela-
tional wellbeing appears, or reappears if it had been lost. Chaos arises as an inner feeling
of despair when we find ourselves in a relational situation in which we cannot show that
there was or there is disorder.
Our way of living and our understanding of it appears to us now to be much more rich and
complex than what we may think that it must have been when our ancestors begun asking
questions as they begun ordering and harmonizing their lives. Yet, in our daily living order
is still secondary to disorder as we act to recover well-being, and harmony is still sec-
ondary to disharmony as we act to recover some lost coherences in our living, all in
processes in which we appear as the generators of the domestic order and coherences in our
living. Our ancestors did not live in disorder, disharmony or chaos. The worlds that they
lived must have been fundamentally ordered, harmonious and reliable, not chaotic because
as they were living they knew how to look. They saw configurations of ecological rela-
tional in the multidimensionality of the worlds that were arising with their living; and they
saw that there were configurations that were more conservative than others … that is they
were living essentially in the same way as us when they began to generate their living in
languaging. So it must have been along their living in language in reflective conversations
that our early ancestor observing the order and harmony that arose in their intentional
doings of their daily living, that the question about how or who created the order and
harmony that they observed in the worlds that they encountered in their daily living begun
to hunt them, and still hunts us now. And since we always feel that that which we
distinguish occurs by itself with independency of what we do, the answer must have been
for them as it still is for us now in our psychic nature, something like this: ‘‘it must be an
entity similar to us, but more powerful that we must respect, a physical or metaphysical
ordering and harmonizing principle that conserves order and harmony in the cosmos’’. The
idea that order and harmony in the worlds that we live are not of a spontaneous origin must
be very … very … very old in our human history, and this is why when we want to explain
and understand the order and harmony that we see in natural happenings we always seem
to need a design or plan as well as a designer or comptroller that must guide its application
for that order or harmony to rise at all.
This is the main difficulty for understanding the arising of order and harmony in
morphogenesis due to the complexity of the process of embryological growth, imagining
123
that it must occur under genetic determination for the conservation of form and function in
reproduction and evolution. This difficulty, however, vanishes or diminishes if we change
our attention and the questions that we ask.
(b) The usual question that we ask in our experience as designers, is: >what must be done
so that a certain desired result is obtained? And if we ask such a question we know that
what we have to do is to design a procedure or plan that we must follow in our doings
approximating to the form or process that we want to happen: we must create a preview
of what we want. And we think that somehow in biological processes such as ontogeny,
growth in embryogenesis, natural selection for ecological coherences, … the same thing
must happen: there must be some sort of plan to attain a desired end, and we invent some
explanatory principles such as genetic heredity, communication, coding and decoding in
transmission of information, … but in doing so we are secretly resorting to some
metaphysical imaginary notions. But if we change our question, and instead of asking
‘‘what guides morphogenesis such that in the process certain forms and behaviors arise
that are adequate for the survival of the organism’’, we ask, how do occur natural
process, including embryonic growth, that all different organisms live their continuous
changing present in adequate coherence with their changing dynamic ecological niches?
All the processes and entities of the cosmos that arises as we explain the sensory–
operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living with the sensory–oper-
ational–relational coherences of the realization of our living arise and occur in a domain of
dynamic structural determinism. That is, all the processes and entities that we distinguish
as human observers in the cosmos that arises as we explain our living with our living
interact and relate according to the different configurations of sensory–operational–rela-
tional coherences that constitute their different structures and define their individual
operational space as they arise with the operation of distinction through which we dis-
tinguish them. So, what happens in the encounters and interactions of the different ele-
ments of the cosmos at any instant in any locality that we may distinguish in it, is
determined always by their local dynamic structural coherences at every instant, and the
course followed by the encounters of the elements of each locality is determined at every
instant by their changing dynamic structural coherences as these arise moment after
moment as a result of their interactions. The configuration of the dynamic structural
coherences of any locality of the cosmos that we may distinguish as it arises as we explain
the coherences of the realization of our living with the coherences of the realization of our
living, is at every instant the present of a history of coherent structural changes. As a result,
any distinction of an entity, relation or process that an observer makes brings forth the
distinguished entity, relation or process together with the systemic ecological niche in
which it occurs, regardless of whether the observer is aware of this or not. Accordingly,
whatever the observer may distinguish arises as a dynamic ecological singularity whose
coherences with the dynamic ecological niche in which it occurs are at every moment the
result of a history of coherent transformations in the systemic locality of the cosmos in
which it occurs.
In other words, at every instant any small or large locality of the cosmos constitutes a
spontaneous open or closed coherent dynamic architecture as the present of a historical
flow of structural transformations according to what results being conserved in the process.
As we observers observe the dynamics of the cosmos we can see that this is valid for all
localities in it and we can see the history of the arising, conservation and transformation of
architectural configurations that go from quantum processes, atoms, molecules, stars,
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galaxies, … to molecular autopoietic systems, cultures … depending on the moment of the

historical flow that we happen to pay attention to.
Thus, if we happen to attend to the locality in which is occurring the spontaneous
molecular autopoiesis of a mammalian embryo in the dynamic ecological niche unity that
it integrates in the womb of its mother, we now know that that happening is the present of
some three thousand eight hundred million years of the evolutionary drift of the conser-
vation of the dynamic architectures of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unities that
begun then as molecular autopoietic systems. And we also know that that embryo is an
aspect of the coherent dynamic historical present of the cosmos that arises with our
distinction. And if we know and understand all that we have been saying along this essay,
we know that that which we distinguish at any instant in the cosmos is the changing present
of some local dynamic architecture in which we can always say that whatever occurs and
the manner in which it occurs and the circumstances in which is happening whatever
happens, is the present of a historical transformation around something that has been
conserved, and that all has necessarily taken place in dynamic ecological structural
coherence or would not be occurring now at all. In these circumstances, the operational
structural and functional coherence of the embryonic processes in the maternal uterus
should not surprise us, because what at first glance appears for us mysterious or improbable
coherences between two accidentally encountering totally independent processes, the
growth of the embryo and the relational ecological niche in which it occurs in the mother’s
womb, are in fact not totally independent processes, but are historical correlations of
interrelated aspects of the dynamic architecture of a the transforming locality of the cosmos
that arose with our distinction. Accordingly, if we want to understand how does the
dynamic architecture operates as it gives rise to whatever it gives rise, we have to attend to
the initial conditions of whatever is being considered as a particular dynamic ecological
structural configuration that will be a continuously arising present that is at every instant a
historical totality of coherent structural configurations valid in itself. Totality that at each
moment is a part of a larger historical totality which the observer could understand only if
he or she manages to observe both mentioned above, in the flow of their historically
correlated transformation. Indeed this is what we human beings do as we observe what we
live as biological–cultural beings (Maturana and Dávila 2008) and reflect about what we
live and do. Whenever a composite unite of any kind arises in any domain, the arising
totality occurs as such in a different sensory–operational–relational domain than its
components and has different characteristics than these; nevertheless as the new totality
interacts through its components its history of interactions with other composite entities
necessarily results in a process of transformations of all the participants that constitutes a
network of structural correlations. This is what happens in the growth of an embryo with
the embryo and the mother and … constituting a dynamic ecological embryo-niche unity.
(c) All occurs spontaneously in the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity in which
the embryo, the mother and we as observing observers happen to exist part of the
resulting historical present of that architecturally coherent ecological organism-niche
unity. Moreover, to describe how this history of coherent processes that result eventually
in the birth of an independent autonomous living being, we do not need to refer to any
notion of purpose, external or internal control, adaptation, information, genetic
information, program, communication or phylogenetic drive … or other notions that
we use to explain the harmonious dynamics that we see as we seem to see how the
different functions and characteristics of the form and manners of operation of the
organism are generated by the dynamics of its epigenesis. Indeed, we biologists and
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philosophers have invented those notions as generative principles to explain how those
functions or characteristics of the manner of living and relating of an organism in its
niche have been generated such that they are indeed adequate for its living, precisely
because we operate in that way when we want to design some instrument or machine
that should operate in a pre-specified manner. But now we know so much of anatomy
and physiology that we want to see how the organisms operate as structural dynamic
entities and the explanatory principles become reductionist invitations that do not let us
see the nature of the structural processes involved. Nothing exists by itself, all things,
concepts, notions, processes … arise in the operation of distinction of the observer, and
so what arises in the sensory–operational–relational space of the observer and what is
the dynamic architecture that sustains that sensory–operational–relational space in the
dynamic ecological niche of the observer depends on the operations of distinction of the
observer (Maturana and Varela 1984). But whatever happens in the operation of the
observer occurs in a coherent historical locality in the cosmos that arises in the
biological–cultural locality that he or she generates in his or her living. Nothing is
chaotic or haphazard in the biological–cultural domain that arises as the observer exists
as a biological–cultural being that generates the cosmos in which he or she exists as he
or she explains and describes his or her living with the coherences of the continuous
realization of his or her living.
The observer always find him or herself immersed in situations in which the course of
the natural drift of the locality in which he or she realizes its living may change unex-
pectedly through happenings of the medium that occurred outside the extension of his or
her ecological niche, and that he or she could not have predicted, or as a result of his or her
reflections that always expand in an intrinsically new manner his or her dynamic ecological
niche as this arises continuously anew with the realization of his or her living as a
molecular autopoietic system. Therefore, the niche as it appears necessary for the observer
as an aspect of the changing dynamics of a medium that he or she does not see but
imagines to be there, is always open to bring forth unexpected events that are never chaotic
although they may appear initially to be so. And it is part of the art of observing of the
observer to discover the sensory–operational–relational domains in which the structural
coherences of those apparently chaotic processes become apparent. The same happens with
the new domains in which the observers enter in their acts of reflection. Namely, the
cosmos that we live arises as a historically coherent deterministic dynamic architecture, as
we describe and explain the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of
our living with the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of our
living as dynamic biological–cultural historical beings operating as local dynamic archi-
tectures in the architecture of the cosmos that we generate.
3 Part 3: Epistemological Reflections
3.1 Nature of Reality
When in our present culture we speak of reality or of something being real, we mean that
we think that that of which we are talking occurs with independency of what we do as we
distinguish it. As such the notion of reality is an explanatory notion (Maturana 1990)
proposed in some moment of our human history to give fundament to the coherences of our
living according to the spontaneity of our feelings and sensations. No doubt it has been a
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very powerful explanatory invention that has constituted an ordering epistemological

grounding for all that we do while our fundamental philosophical question has been asking
for the essence of things, the nature of the being and the unity of all as it exists inde-
pendently of what we do. Such fundamental attitude has not interfered with our asking
about how happens all that happens, inventing metaphysical explanatory notions to go on
when the questions turned about ourselves and we could not answer them beyond referring
to our inner feelings and body sensoriality. It was only when the historical moment came,
by the middle of the twentieth century, about 1965, in which we as humanity could answer
reflexive questions such as how does our nervous system operates in the process of per-
ception that was possible to begin to answer that question in the domain of our operation as
molecular autopoietic systems: that is, in domain of the realization of our living. It was
only in that moment that it was possible to understand that the fact that we living beings do
not distinguish in our experience between what we call in our daily living perception and
illusion is not a limitation or a failure of the operation of our nervous system because it
operates as a closed network of relations of neuronal activities that are in themselves
semantically independent of the ecological niche and of the medium in which the organism
exists. Perception and illusion are distinctions that we languaging human beings make as
we operate as observers when we compare two experiences that we have lived as valid: we
speak of perception when we use two experiences that we live as valid and which we
consider not contradictory to confirm each other; and we speak of illusion when we have
two experiences that we live as valid but we feel are contradictory, and we chose one of
which we do not want to doubt as an argument to invalidate the other. The notions of
perception and illusion refer to the way we live our experiences as we live our living not to
the nature of the experiences themselves. If we accept what we have just said is the case,
then we cannot but become aware that the historically fundamental philosophical questions
about the ‘‘being in itself or about the essence of that which we distinguish’’ are questions
that cannot be answered. And if we accept this, then we have to change those questions for
questions of the form: ‘‘what do I do when I make a distinction such that appears that
which appears when I do what I did?’’ These are questions about what we do, questions
that as such can always be answered, and not questions about some transcendental entity
about which we cannot speak (Maturana 2007).
Accordingly, we live trusting in that whenever we repeat what we do together with the
circumstances in which we do it we obtain the same result, and we live trusting in that
when this does not happen it is because we have not repeated what we did. In our daily
living we call reality all the sensory, operational and relational regularities that we nor-
mally use as languaging reflective human beings to describe our effective doings in the
realization of our living. Problems arise in our daily living in relation to our notion of
reality only when our doings do not do what we expect that they should do, or when we do
not trust each other or ourselves in relation to what we are doing, or when someone
proposes an explanatory notion of transcendental metaphysical nature because is not
supported by the coherences of our daily living.
3.2 Nature of Our Conceptual Difficulties
Some conceptual difficulties arise when in the attempt to understand the nature of our
existence in the molecular domain we become reductionists and immerse ourselves in the
unexpected dimensions of quantum physics trying to find there the operational–relational
constitution of the molecular, sub-molecular and meta-molecular elements involved in the
realization of our molecular autopoiesis that would allow us to explain our operation as
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self-conscious human beings. However, what happens with our molecular components at
the sub molecular, subatomic and at the quantum level of their own composition is an
intrinsic aspect of their constitution as molecules, and is present in all that happens with
them in all the circumstances of their operations as components of our dynamic archi-
tecture, and do not determine the nature of what happens in the relational space in which
operate as totalities the entities that they compose: the components of a composite entity do
not determine the operation of the entities of which they are components in the relational
space in which these operate as totalities.
What happens with the components of a composite unity, as they exist integrating it as a
totality? How do they participate in the realization and the transformation of a dynamic
totality? What an observer sees as he or she happens to distinguish a composite unity as it
conserves its class identity while it interacts in its niche, is that this occurs only as long all
the changes that happen to the components and the relations between them occur in such a
way that the class identity of the composite unity is conserved, regardless of how those
changes are arising or occur. That is, it does not matter whether the changes were the result
the interactions of the organism as it operates as a totality, or of some internal process such
as molecular radiations, or of the happening of some subatomic quantum mechanical
interaction that are aspects of the dynamic molecular architecture of the realization of the
operation of the process in which the components of the composite unity happen to be
involved at any instant. Therefore, an organism stays living as an organism of a particular
kind only while all that happens in it and to it in the flow of its interactions results in that
all the changes that occur in its components and in their relations happen in the continuous
conservation of its particular class identity as a particular kind of molecular autopoietic
system.
What is usually not easy to visualize is the abstract-concrete double nature of any entity
that we distinguish in any domain in which we make our distinctions. Nothing exists in and
by itself; something exists pertaining to a relational dynamics of conservation in which
what is conserved is conserved together with the circumstances in which it is conserved,
and both last together as a dynamic totality that arises when it is distinguished by an
observer as a dynamic ecological entity-niche unity relation. And like everything that we
conceive and name, that dynamic ecological entity-niche unity relation has an abstract-
concrete double nature in the sensory–operational–relational domains of distinctions that
we generate in our living as languaging-reflective human beings that operate as observers.
As we languaging and reflective human beings make a distinction, we do it in the midst of
some conscious or unconscious network of conversations, and whatever we distinguish
arises with some explicit or implicit meaning as an abstract entity that has sense in the
sensory–operational–relational matrix entailed in the flow of the network of conversation
in which it belongs. At the same time whatever operation we perform in the act of
distinction, occurs in the moment that it happens as a concrete molecular happening of the
realization of our molecular autopoiesis.
Living beings that do not exist as languaging beings operate in the same way that we do,
and they do all that they do in the space of the concrete molecular dynamics of the
realization of the molecular processes of their molecular autopoiesis; but as sensory–
operational–relational beings their encounters in their dynamic ecological niche also
involves configurations of sensory–operational–relations that we would have to call
abstract relational dimensions. We as human observers may ascribe meaning to those
operations according to the meaning that they evoke in the semantic domain of our living,
but they do not occur in a semantic domain as an aspect of the realization of the living of
those organisms to the extent that they do not operate as languaging beings.
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Things arise in the domain of the realization of our living as human languaging beings
with some explicit or implicit meaning as abstractions of some particular configuration of
sensory–operational–relations that realize them as the concrete sensory–operational–rela-
tional entities that occur in the domain in which we manipulate them while we do what we
do. No doubt that we human beings refer to the entities that we distinguish in what we do
as concrete or abstract operational entities, according to the different configurations of
sensory–relational–operational feelings that we live while we do what we do in the dif-
ferent sensory–operational–relational domains in which we realize our molecular autop-
oiesis in the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that we integrate as we operate as
totalities.
This abstract-concrete double nature of what ever we distinguish is frequently difficult
to evoke in our attempt to speak of the dynamic ecological entity-niche unity that arises as
an abstract-concrete sensory–operational–relational dynamics in our domain of existence
as totalities in the process of talking about the concreteness of the realization of our
molecular autopoiesis. Thus, for example, when an observer of a not human organism
speaks of its dynamic ecological niche, he or she is referring to that part of the ‘‘medium’’
that he/she sees that contains it, and in which he or she sees that its interactions result in
that its particular manner of living is continuously and recursively conserved through the
continuous realization of its molecular autopoiesis. And as the observer makes the dis-
tinction what he or she brings forth is a totality in which the abstract and the concrete may
appear only as an a-posterior recursive reflexive distinction according to what he or she
does with it in his or her doings or reflections. Thus, when we talk about the niche of an
organism we are not referring to some particular collection of molecules, but we are
referring to our abstraction of some particular configuration of molecular processes in the
dynamic encounter of an organism with that part of the medium in which it realizes its
living that arises continuously anew while it lives.
Furthermore it is not fully apparent that when the dynamic ecological organism-niche
unity disintegrates, what vanishes is the dynamic totality constituted by the organism and
its dynamic ecological niche. And it is not fully apparent either that the area of the
organism at which its interactions with medium result in the arising and conservation of its
dynamic ecological organism-niche unity constitutes the abstract sensory–operational–
relational surface of the organism that arises into existence as it appears in concreteness
when the observer distinguishes its operation as such. Yet, no matter how it appears to us
as observers in our operational domain as totalities, and no matter what we may think about
the nature of what happens in the interactions of the molecular entities that we distinguish,
if we do not see the unitary intrinsic double abstract-concrete nature of all the entities that
we may distinguish in our operation as observers, we shall be unconsciously inclined to
forcibly separate them as we attempt to understand the worlds that we generate as we
explain our living with our living: for example, when we treat ourselves as composed of
body and mind arise two different kinds of entities existing in contradictory domains as if
we were composed by them.
In our daily living we use notions of abstractness or concreteness according to what
sensory dimensions, or what sensory effectors configurations of our living guide what we
do, the same happens with other organisms although we are not always aware as we
observe them of the sensory operational domain in which they operate at any particular
moment. But we are aware that they do not operate in the body-soul or body and mind
fragmentation in which we frequently do; they operate in that sense as unities guided by
their sensory effectors configurations as they arise in the conservation of their well-being in
the realization of their living. What our human living in networks of conversations and
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reflections adds is sensory–operational–relational domains that are only possible to lan-

guaging living beings and which constitutes our multidimensional cultural domain in
which we exist as biological–cultural beings.
3.3 Nature of the Unity Organism-Nervous System
We all living beings resemble each other as molecular autopoietic systems, and to that
extent we all living beings realize our living in dynamic ecological organism-niche unities
that have similar architectural configurations that an observer sees as giving rise to similar
sensory–operational–relational kinds of inner feelings, doings and emotions. We all ver-
tebrates realize our behaviors with similar nervous systems (the vertebrate nervous system)
that operate generating sensory-effectors correlations at our sensory-effectors surfaces as
vertebrates in our interactions with our dynamic ecological niche. Moreover, we all human
beings realize all our different relational behaviors regardless of what an observer may
think about their concrete or abstract nature as operational domains with nervous systems
that operate in similar manners as they generate our sensory-effectors correlations in our
sensory-effectors surfaces in our recursive interactions with our abstract-concrete dual
nature in our dynamic ecological niche.
As we have said above, an organism as a composite entity exists in two not intersecting
sensory–operational–relational domains, the domain of the operation of its components and
the domain in which it operates as a totality. In the domain in which the organism operates
as a totality it operates with characteristics, features or properties that are different from the
characteristics, features or properties of its components even though it interacts through
them. For example, when we say ‘‘Peter, there is your apple’’ we are speaking and
interacting in a cultural sensorial–operational–relational domain in which we operate as
totalities in our abstract nature, which is where abstract entities such as distinctions and
sentences make sense. However, our encounter as totalities with the entity that we called
apple occurs through our concrete nature as molecular autopoietic beings through the
encounter of light photons, reflected by the surface of the apple, with the photosensitive
molecules of the photoreceptors of our retina as they operate with properties and features
that pertain to their existence as molecules that operate as components of our organism. In
our operation as totalities in our relational space as persons, we do not encounter photons,
molecules or electrons, we encounter persons and apples, and in our operation as molecular
entities through our sensory receptors we do not encounter persons or apples, we encounter
photons, molecules, electrons …
In general terms, the fact that a composite entity exists in two not intersecting sensorial–
operational–relational domains results in that an observer cannot deduce what happens
with a composite entity as it operates as a totality, from what may be happening with the
operation of its components. And similarly, an observer cannot deduce what may be
happening with the components of a composite entity from what he or she happens to see
that is occurring in the domain in which the composite unity interacts as a totality.
What an observer may see in the actual operation of a dynamic composite entity are two
kinds of processes: one, the concreteness of the transformation of the composite entity as a
changing dynamic architecture, in a historical process that appears to him or her as
occurring in cero time as a continuous changing present; and two, the abstract dynamics of
his or her observing as a continuous historical reflection about what he or she thinks that
may be the meaning of what is happening, inventing semantic relations that would connect
for him or her the before and after of his or her memories of what has been occurring in the
observed architectural transformation. As a synthesis of these two processes, the observer
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may say in his or her reflections that whatever happens with the components of a composite
entity in its architectural features results in changes in the domain in which the composite
entity operates as a concrete totality, and that any consideration that he or she as an
observer can make about the meaning of what is occurring pertains to the abstract domain
of his or her dual existence as an observing human being. At the same time, if the observed
composite entity is an organism operating in its dynamic ecological niche, the observer
will see in the flow of his or her own historical reflections that some of the components of
the organism operate in their interactions constituting the abstract domain of its sensory–
operational–relational surface participating in the realization of the sensory-effectors
correlations that realize its behavior as a totality.
Every entity arises as it is brought into existence by the operation of distinction of an
observer as an entity that operates at the same time in two distinct sensory–operational–
relational domains, abstract and concrete, according to what the observer does with it. We
human beings as we operate as observers also arise in our self-distinction as languaging
reflective human persons finding that nothing exists by itself, and that everything exists
only as it arises through our operation of distinction as observers operating as singular
entities in this dual abstract and concrete existence according to what we do in our exis-
tence as observers (Maturana 2005). This dual existence of all the entities that we dis-
tinguish as we operate as observers is what permits us human beings to do all that we do as
we reflect on what we do and manipulate our doings. And it is in this manner that the
dynamic ecological niche of an organism can have as many abstract and concrete
dimensions according to the manner of living that it happens to live, alone or in com-
munities, in the actual realization of its molecular autopoiesis.
In these circumstances we as observers can see that an organism in its operation as a
totality operates as if it were itself in its operation as such what we call a nervous system in
multi-cellular animals. We biologists usually call nervous system a network of interacting
cells (neuronal elements) that trigger in each other changes of relations of activity that
result in the organism in changes of relations of activities in its sensory and effectors
surfaces (Maturana 1974) that result in its different behaviors in its interactions in its
dynamic ecological niche. What we have said so far in this section shows that the whole
organism operates as a nervous system regardless of whether its architectural realization is
unicellular or multi-cellular: the manner of operation of the components of an organism
that we call nervous system can be realized through the dynamic relations of the molecules
that compose a unicellular organism or through the molecular and cellular components that
realize a multi-cellular one.
All this occurs in an organism as it operates as a totality in which all the elements that
compose it participate as elements of a multidimensional sensory-effectors system that
coordinates its sensory–operational–relational dynamics around the realization of some
sensory configurations that guide moment after moment the natural drift of its architectural
transformation as it interacts in its dynamic ecological niche, generating a course that
results in the realization of its molecular autopoiesis in the dynamic ecological niche in
which its living is conserved, or generating a course that results in that its living is not
conserved and it dies as its molecular autopoiesis vanishes. Furthermore, all this occurs in
the natural drift of a spontaneous dynamics of molecular self-assembly without the par-
ticipation of any organizing principle, genetic plan, information processing or of pur-
poseful hidden metaphysical inspiration. As we just said above, as the molecular dynamics
of a unicellular organism occurs in the continuous realization of its molecular autopoiesis,
it realizes the sensory–operational–relational dynamic of coordination of the flow of the
interactions of the unicellular organism with its always newly arising dynamic ecological
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niche operating as a molecular nervous system. And as this occurs the actual dynamic
realization of the molecular autopoiesis of the unicellular organism operates as its dynamic
sensory–operational–relational surface guiding the course of its interactions in its dynamic
ecological niche. When in the evolutionary drift arise multi-cellular organisms, the nervous
system appears as a discrete multi-cellular system of sensory effectors coordinations in the
flow of their encounters in their always newly arising dynamic ecological niche, but each
organism as a whole continues operating as an organism-nervous system sensory–opera-
tional–relational totality. It is this integrated organism-nervous system manner of living
that makes possible that an organism may live recursive internal co-ordinations of co-
ordinations of abstract processes that give rise in it to new kinds of relational abstract
behaviors in its dynamic ecological niche that an observer may call feelings, emotions and
actions of abstract relational nature in the organisms that he or she observes.
3.4 Nature of the Act of Knowing
When we reflective human beings say in our cultural present that a person knows how to do
something or has knowledge about some particular thing, we are claiming that that person
has the operational capacities to behave adequately in the circumstances in which we
observe her, according to what we think that is adequate behavior for those circumstances.
And we do so because we think that that person behaves in a manner that satisfies some
criterion of validation that we put in our observing as we observe her. So we speak of
knowledge as something that we say that a person has when we think that she is acting
properly as we observe her. Knowledge is an interpersonal relation. What we do not always
realize or are aware of is that what is central in any claim of cognition is the criterion of
validation that we consciously or unconsciously use to claim that something is true or false,
valid or not valid, good or not good, even though we frequently ask ‘‘how do you know that
that is so?’’ Nothing is true or false, valid or not valid, good or not good in itself … all
depends on the criterion of validation used to accept one or the other in any case. But if
nothing is true or false, good or bad, adequate or inadequate of its own nature, and if there
is not any universal or absolute criterion to decide for one or the other of the alternatives,
how do we harmonize what we do? How is it that we can collaborate, or agree or disagree
in a manner that results meaningful for the participants?
Collaboration, agreement and disagreement are possible only if we have some common
basic criteria that define a space in which we may desire to be together in the pleasure of
doing so. When that happens the participants generate a common dynamic ecological niche
that intersects in some measure with their individual dynamic ecological niches. Indeed the
only way in which different persons may generate a domain of mutual understanding in
doings, feelings, desires and criteria of validation for some common enterprise, is through
living together in the desire of living together in the generation of a common dynamic
ecological niche in which they understands each other because they listen to each other in
mutual respect, conserving their autonomy precisely because they have lived together
transforming together in mutual and self-respect in close and distant coherent doings
(collaboration) in a common project. This is valid for all organisms in their different
domains of existence, what is peculiar to us human beings is that we live as languaging
living beings in a sensory, operational and relational domain in which we can reflect on
what we do and consciously chose what we do or not do.
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3.5 Nature of Self-Consciousness
When we speak of self-consciousness we usually speak as if we were referring to some

property or particular manner of operating of the nervous system. We think differently, we
think that self-consciousness is a manner of relating, a manner of operating in the recursive
dynamics of our living in languaging in which we act or operate distinguishing ourselves
distinguishing ourselves in what we do. As we operate in the flow of our living together
objects arise, concrete and abstract objects that we can distinguish and handle as different
aspects of our dynamic ecological niche. We begin as children to learn to exist in self-
consciousness, when our mothers ask us when we are little: ‘‘Peter, do you see what you
are doing?’’ That reflexive question creates the space of self-distinctions, and initiates the
sensory–operational–relational dynamics of conscious and unconscious self-distinctions as
a relational space that can occur only in the recursive operation of our living together in
languaging that in our daily living we call self-consciousness.
The usual difficulty for understanding and accepting that self-consciousness occurs as a
sensory–operational–relational interpersonal dynamics, and not as a property of the mind
or as a manner of operation of the nervous system, is fundamentally a reductionist attitude
that may sometimes orient us biologists to think in terms of functions, that are relational
notions that obscure what happens, and not in terms of processes that are descriptors of
how arises what we do or what we distinguish.
3.6 Nature of Our Sensory, Operational and Relational Existence
We operate as dynamically closed molecular autopoietic systems. Our nervous system as a

closed network of neuronal elements operates as a closed network of changes of relations
of activities that generate a closed dynamics of sensory-effectors correlations in our body-
hood. As we observe ourselves operating as organisms, that is, as totalities, in the eco-
logical organism-niche unity that we integrate as every living being does, we see us as we
see every other organism operating immersed in an external world. Yet, when we reflect as
observing reflecting human beings about how does occur our cognitive living, we find that
we cannot speak about an external world (reality) that we suppose to exist with inde-
pendency from what we do as we attempt to say something about it. Furthermore, we find
as well that whatever we live and experience as an external world, occurs in the intimacy of
our inner feelings as a multidimensional matrix of sensory effectors correlations which in
our operation in the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that we integrate, and that
whatever we live in our coexistence with other human beings also occurs in the dynamics
of the closed network of changes of relations of activities of our nervous system that
generates the closed dynamics of sensory-effectors correlations in our body-hood.
As we cannot speak about anything that we may imagine as existing with independency
of what we do, the sensations that we feel as we touch, see, smell, taste or hear are not
sensations about ourselves or about an outside world. They are sensations that acquire one
character or another in the sensory effectors configuration that goes with the ongoing
behavior of the organism in the particular circumstance of its ontogeny that it is living in
the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that it integrates at that moment. If I touch
something my touching does not reveal the thing touched as a thing in itself, if I see
something my seeing does not reveal the seen something as a seen entity in itself, but the
thing, the object seen, arises in the configuration of sensations that go with the doings that
bring forth the object or things as aspects of my doings in the domain of my inner
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sensoriality of doings that I am living. As we experience seeing, touching, hearing thinking

… that which we distinguish appears to us as existing independently of what we do as we
distinguish it, and we attempt to refer to it as if it were having existence in itself in a
transcendental domain different from that of our existence as molecular autopoietic sys-
tems. Yes, anything that we distinguish as we operate as observers appears to occur in a
sensory, relational and operational domain that transcends the molecular materiality that
supports it in our distinction, but it is not in itself, it arises into existence with our
distinction of it. The same happens with us, we are not the molecules that make us possible
as we transcend them as we exist in a sensory, operational and relational domain, as all
living systems do, not in the molecularity that makes us possible: we exist in a sensory,
operational and relational domain in which we recursively coordinate our inner feelings,
doings and emotionings as languaging (Maturana 2005, Maturana and Dávila 2008) and
reflexive human beings that can choose what they do, and in which we find ourselves as
totalities in an operational–relational domain that involves molecules, relations and
reflections.
We as languaging reflecting human beings exist in a relational operational domain in
which we arise as living human beings in our self-distinction as the sensory–operational–
relational dynamics Homo sapiens-amans amans (Maturana and Dávila 2008). Every
entity, thing or process that we distinguish is the verb or dynamic of doings that the noun
with which we name it obscures. At the same time everything, entity or process that we
distinguish exists as a dynamic ecological thing or process in the entity-niche unity in
which it occurs as it arises in our distinction in the domain of our realization as molecular
autopoietic systems. Nothing exists by itself, but at the same time everything exists with its
domain of existence as the dynamic ecological entity-niche unity that arises with the
operation of distinction with which we distinguish it. If some day human beings become
extinct, the cosmos will vanish, and a new one may arise if some new kind of reflective
being appears and explains the coherences of its existence with the coherences of its
existence.
3.7 Nature of the Ontogenic Phenotype
The process of embryonic transformation happens as a dynamic architecture that occurs in

an intimate continuously changing present with no reference to what may be happening
moment after moment in the relational space of the growing organism as we mentioned
before, or with what the observer may want to evoke as he or she uses reflective notions of
coding or information as if they were revealing the depth of his or her understanding of
what is indeed happening. The use of these notions by the observer obscures his or her
possibility of establishing and understanding the historical correlation of what may be
happening at any instant in the dynamic architecture of the organism with what occurs in
the present of its interactions as it operates as a totality in its dynamic ecological niche. The
notion of genetic coding has become a metaphysical temptation to reduce molecular
interactions in the biological processes to communications and transmission of information
as if these were actual molecular happenings in the structural dynamics of the growing
embryo. What we have to understand is how in the long evolutionary history of the
uninterrupted continuous conservation of the realization of the molecular autopoiesis of the
living systems, the dynamic architecture of the different lineages that have arisen in the
natural evolutionary drift, have become different forms of realizing the molecular autop-
oiesis of the organisms as different manners of living. What we see as different lineages of
manners of living in the different manners of the realization of the molecular autopoiesis,
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are different dynamic architectures that can be repeated from one generation to the next
including some variations, through the systemic reproduction of some different basic
architectural configuration under the form of different initial dynamic ecological organism-
niche unities. We have talked about those basic initial conditions as we talk about the
dynamic architecture of the ecological stem-cell-niche unity without fully describing them,
but we have shown that we think that they must have been those of the basic initial
architectural configuration of the first primeval ecological molecular-autopoietic-bac-
terium-niche unity that underwent a reproductive division. That first step initiated a lineage
of ecological molecular autopoietic stem-cells-niche unities and the phylogenetic natural
drift of transformation around the conservation of that initial condition. The process of the
phylogenetic natural drift of a lineage of reproducing molecular autopoietic systems
happens as a historical process of transformation of the dynamic architecture of an eco-
logical stem-cell-niche unity and necessarily occurs as a historical lineal process open to
recursive increasing complexity around what is conserved. In living systems what is
conserved is the cyclical dynamics of molecular autopoiesis and reproduction. Those of our
ancestors that in different moments of our history faced the need and desire of explaining
the enormous diversity of manners of living, all effective in their respective undisturbed
medium did what they could using their own manners of living and thinking to generate
explanations that would satisfy them for some time. Yet, it has not been until the last three
hundred years that ideas could be developed with the possibility of understanding the
spontaneous character of the natural process in a way that has become possible to visualize
the dynamic architecture of the ecological organism-niche unity, and the spontaneous
nature of the evolutionary transformation and diversification of lineages of living systems
through natural drift in an uninterrupted dynamic of conservation through systemic
reproduction of a dynamic architecture of spontaneous self-assembling molecular
autopoietic systems.
In these circumstances, the first step in understanding biological evolution through
natural drift, without resorting to the notion of coding of information, is to understand that
in the process of systemic reproduction what is reproduced is an ecological organism-niche
unity under the form of a basic self-assembling dynamic architecture such that variations in
its manner of realization may be conserved. Therefore, when there is sequential systemic
reproduction two kinds of things may happen, namely, the conservation of a lineage or the
arising of a new lineage in a dynamic of conservation of adaptation in a changing medium.
When systemic reproduction stops happening, there is lineage extinction.
The fundamental result of evolutionary natural drift under the systemic reproduction of
the dynamic ecological organism-unity is that every living system while it lives exists in
structural, sensory, operational and relational coherences with the cosmic locality that is
the medium in which it occurs.
4 Part 4: Metaphysical Temptations
4.1 Existence Beyond Existing
Metaphysical notions are explanatory propositions and reflections with which we attempt
to refer to experiences that we live with the feeling that their source lies outside the realm
of our sensory–operational–relational handling of our doings in the different domains of
our daily living. As such they are explanatory inventions that, when we accept them, and
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depending on their particular nature, can give transcendental order and meaning to our
living, or conserve a mystery instead of an understanding that illuminates our daily living
with love in an ethical social existence.
Metaphysical notions distract us from the possibility of understanding how do we exist
and operate as living beings in our daily living.
4.2 Explanatory Principles
We all individual human beings exist as the present members of some lineage that arose in
the conservation via systemic reproduction of a manner of living that entails sexual inti-
mate encounters that must occur as manners of behavior in which we approach each other
in the pleasure of mutual body acceptance. As a result of this we human beings are the
present of a history of natural drift of changing together congruently in the evolutionary
drift of our abstract and concrete behaviors, so that we presently all live as sexual animals
realizing and conserving interrelated dynamic ecological organism-niche unities in which
that manner of living can occur. In systemic reproduction what is conserved from one
generation to the next is the structural dynamics of an ecological ontogenic phenotype in
the form of an ecological organism-niche unity as a manner of living (Maturana and
Mpodozis 2000). So sequences of events of systemic reproduction of molecular autopoietic
systems constitute lineages of ontogenic phenotypes or manners of living that can be
conserved ad infinitum. At the same time, since what is conserved from one generation to
the next in systemic reproduction is the ontogenic realization of an ecological organism-
niche unity through the continuous conservation of the realization of the molecular
autopoiesis in it, regardless of the manner in which this happens, the systemic reproduction
of the ecological organism-niche unity is a process continuously open to giving rise to new
lineages through the conservation of any ontogenic variation that does not interferes with
the realization of the molecular autopoiesis in it. Living systems live sliding in the real-
ization of their molecular autopoiesis in the ecological organism-niche unity that they
integrate, regardless of whatever may happen in their continuously changing dynamic
structure, following the tangent in their encounter with the medium in which their
molecular autopoiesis is conserved, or they die. As a result of this, since all ontogenic
variation in the ecological organism-niche unity that do not interfere with the realization of
the molecular autopoiesis of the organism in it, are conserved in systemic in reproduction,
systemic reproduction becomes the fundament for the conservation and diversification o
lineages in evolutionary drift. Conservation of adaptation in the conservation of the
molecular autopoiesis in the realization of living in a dynamic ecological organism-niche
unity in a continuously changing medium, and the conservation of ontogenic variation in
the manner of the realization of living through systemic reproduction, constitute the fun-
daments of the evolution of living systems in the dynamic of natural drift as a continuous
process of open ended conservation and diversification of lineages of manners of living.
The relation of sensory, operational and relational coherence with the medium to which
we usually refer when we speak of adaptation or of becoming adapted is misleading and
becomes an explanatory principle because in the realization of living the relation of
adaptation is not a variable: an organism is alive only while it is in sensory, operational and
relational coherence with the medium in which it occurs in the ecological organism-niche
that it integrates.
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4.3 Cognition
The understanding of these basic sensory, operational and relational conditions of the
existence of living beings in general, and of us human beings in particular, namely,
systemic reproduction, conservation of adaptation and relational-abstract as well as con-
crete double existence, show that we as living beings live in dynamic ecological organism-
niche unities that intersect in numerous forms of multi-dimensional networks of abstract-
concrete processes that constitute groups of living beings in which we, as observers can
only distinguish operational boundaries that arise as a consequences of what they do in the
flow of their interactions in their continuously changing present. In our daily living, when
we observe a person operating adequately in the circumstance in which we observe her,
may say that she knows what she is doing. And as we do so, the expression ‘‘she knows
what she is doing’’ means that we think that what she does is adequate according to what
we think is adequate doing for the circumstances in which we observe her. But whatever an
organism does at any moment is the only thing that it can do in the present of its sensory,
operational and relational ‘‘now’’ in the course of the natural drift of the dynamic eco-
logical organism-niche unity that it integrates.
What is interesting in the nature of the natural drift of the dynamic ecological organism-
niche unities, regardless of their diversity and of their complexity, is that it occurs as a
spontaneous dynamics that generates what we see as sensory, operational and relational
harmony, and not as disorder. We marvel at the beauty and harmony in nature, as if the
different processes that constitute the continuous operation of the different dynamic eco-
logical organism-niche unity had been specially designed with the intent that they should
operate coherently regardless of their nature, speaking some times of synchrony. And in
our awe in front of the mystery of how could it have happened, thinking that it is
impossible that such harmony could have arisen spontaneously in the haphazard of a
probabilistic world, we want to tranquilize our souls inventing some metaphysical
explanatory principles that could violate structural determinism. That is a great meta-
physical temptation, yet it is not necessary to fall in it.
The operation of the dynamic ecological niche-unity shows that the continuously arising
and conservation of the order and the harmony in all biological processes happens as a
result of the conservation of the dynamic structural coupling of all the processes involved
in the ontogenetic and evolutionary natural drift of the dynamic architecture of the dy-
namic ecological organism-niche unity in which all organisms exists guided by their
sensoriality following the path of the realization of their different manners of living in an
independently changing medium … or die. The metaphysical notions that are proposed are
presented under the form special properties that would be intrinsic to the biological pro-
cesses such as ‘‘intentionality’’, ‘‘teleological dynamics’’, ‘‘finality’’ or genetic teleonomy
in the epigenetic and evolutionary arising and conservation of lineages. All these meta-
physical notions are proposed under a deep inner feeling that the complexity of biological
processes is so great that cannot be the simple spontaneous result of some ontogenetic and
phylogenic dynamics that are not guided by some end oriented purposeful organizational
principle.
4.4 Probability
We as scientific usually say that we live in a probabilistic universe, because we cannot

predict or compute what will happen, and that we can only speak of chance and
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probabilities. We think that in that statement there is an epistemological confusion. In a

prediction what we do is to make a computation operating with some configuration of
operational coherences that we think is an abstraction of the operational coherences that
define what happens in a particular natural domain. Therefore, if we cannot make such
abstraction in the particular domain of our interest, we cannot compute what will happen in
it. But, if we know the total operational coherences of what happens in any domain and we
trust the basic structural determinism of the cosmos that arises through our living as
molecular autopoietic systems as we explain the coherences of our living with the
coherences of our living, then, although we cannot claim to make an abstraction of the
coherences of the fundamental processes that constitute it, we can always make a com-
putation of the probability of the possible results of our operations in it according to the
coherences that we can observe at present. A computation is a cognitive operation that
extrapolates the consequences of generating a system of logical transformations in some
particular operational domain around the conservation of some basic configuration of
relations in it that we assume are intrinsic to it. A computation, therefore, only tells us what
would happen in that system if what we assume to be the case were the case, so it only tells
us something about what we think that we know, but it tells us nothing about the ‘‘intrinsic
nature of the operational coherences’’ of the domain in which we claim that happens what
we compute. We cannot compute what will happen in the course of our living, but we
know that the course that our living will follow will be determined, moment after moment,
by what we conserve through our sensory–operational interactions in our dynamic eco-
logical niche.
4.5 Progress and Intentionality
In our cultural present we speak of progress to refer to a transformation whose outcome

seems to us to constitute something better than what was before in some particular situation
according to some personal scale of goodness or values. Yet we usually speak as if the
notion of progress connoted changes that are valuable by themselves, which is not the case.
The notion of progress however is a notion that applies only to what we do in the cultural
dimensions of our ecological niche, and does not apply to the spontaneous nature of the
cosmos that arises as we explain the coherences of our living with the coherences of our
living in the domain of the realization of our molecular autopoiesis in the flow of our
biological natural evolutionary drift. Something similar happens with the notion of in-
tentionality that is also a notion that applies only in our reflections as we live as biological–
cultural beings and not in the ecological dynamics of the organism-niche unity that we
integrate as molecular autopoietic systems. It happens though that the notions of progress
and intentionality may easily become metaphysical temptations in the moment in which we
stop trusting structural determinism, and we confuse what we think that a system is doing
in its relational as it operates as a totality, with the processes of its internal dynamics that
generate it as a that totality. For example, we see in the biological evolution what it seems
to us an increase of complexity and harmony in the dynamic ecological organism-niche
unity in the history of the members of a lineage, occurring in a manner that seems
impossible to understand without the participation of some directive mechanism, and we
resort to some metaphysical notions to calm our anxiety. If we do not see that the natural
drift of living systems occurs as a historical process in which the organisms conserve
through systemic reproduction their relation of operational coherences with the changing
part of the medium in which they exists, we cannot understand the way natural drift
operates. And we cannot do so because we cannot see that the process of natural drift
123
necessarily results either in the stabilization, the simplification or the increase in com-
plexity of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that the organisms integrate along
the conservation and diversification of their lineages, through the operation of their sen-
soriality that all the time guides the conservation of their living in the flow of the con-
tingency of the encounter of the changing organisms with the changing medium in which
they realize their ecological niches, or they die. Whatever happens in the course of the
evolutionary natural drift, whether it seems to us that it is an increase or decrease in the
complexity or harmony or beauty of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unities or of
the diversification of the physiological–anatomical complexity in the arising of new lin-
eages, all occurs without the action of any ordering force as a spontaneous changing
dynamic architecture while the realization of the molecular autopoiesis of the reproducing
organisms are conserved in systemic reproduction. So, everything that happens in the lives
of living beings is the spontaneous result of the historical dynamics of their structural drift
as this occurs as the continuous and recursive transformation of the dynamic ecological
organism-niche unity that they integrate and realize guided by the operation of their
sensoriality in the conservation of their circumstantial well-being in the realization of their
molecular autopoiesis.
4.6 Information
We generally talk about information in our cultural present as if it were some kind of
operational entity that can be handled, contained, modified and transferred from one person
to another in a process that is generally called communication. Moreover we generally use
the notion of information as an operational or as an explanatory principle in a relational
dynamics when we speak of transmitting information as if a receptor of that transmission
were to receive something from the transmitter that would expand his or her knowledge or
understanding in some particular situation. As we think in this way we obscure the fact that
the notion of transmission of information, as it was proposed in the mathematical theory of
communications, refers to interactions in which the state of uncertainty of an observer is
reduced when he or she receives some signal that permits him or her to associate or
correlate alternatives occurring in different separate domains, that are otherwise isomor-
phic in that respect. If I do not understand this, I may say that the genome of a zygote
contains the information needed for the embryo to grow and transform in a way specified
by that information in the process of becoming an adult. Yet, the growth of the embryo
occurs as a dynamic architecture of local processes of spontaneous assembly guided at
every instant by the assemblies already realized in a process that occurs without plans or
the need of imagining an organizing notion such as information. We do not know at present
the initial dynamic architecture of the embryo, but we know that this initial dynamic
architecture must be such that it may initiate a series of structural transformation that result
in a process of continuous transformation of the dynamic architecture of the ecological
niche in which it is immersed such that its relational form becomes the form of the adult of
the species to which it belongs.
4.7 Genes, Genetic Determination
The notions of gene, heredity and of genetic determination are very interesting notions
because they have been both very inspiring in biological research and understanding
biological evolution, but at the same time have become great explanatory reductionist
temptations. The notion of gene is used as a molecular dynamic evocation of
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developmental and relational processes as well as a molecular visualization of the dynamic

molecular architecture of the processes of the synthesis of different kinds of molecules and
of the dynamic of coordination of their synthesis … but their conceptual use in those terms
as explanatory principles has frequently obscured the understanding of those very same
processes. For example, a historical process such as embryonic growth occurs in two not
intersecting domains: (a) the domain of the actual processes that takes place in the
structural internal dynamics of the growing embryo as a dynamic architecture, and (b) the
relational domain in which the growing organism interacts as a totality in the medium that
is arising with it through the different features of its body generated in it through the
process of its growth as its interactional and relational surfaces. These two domains do not
intersect, and one cannot deduce from what happens in the internal dynamics of the
growing organism what will happen with it as it interacts as a totality in the in the medium
that is arising with it operating with its own independent structural dynamics; yet we
biologists says that the genes codify the information needed for the realization of the
molecular dynamics that gives rise to the organism through its growth. ‘‘How did the
process of growth occurred?’’… ‘‘Well …the genes carried the information for those
processes to occur’’. ‘‘How does an organism interact with an independent medium and
stays alive?’’ ‘‘Following through the operation of its sensoriality the tangent path in which
it conserves its well-being’’.
4.8 Molecular Manipulations
A living being exists as a dynamic self-assembling molecular architecture that realizes

itself as a molecular autopoietic system. As such a living system exists as a closed network
of cyclical molecular processes of molecular productions that produces itself as a singular
dynamic architecture in continuous structural transformation around the conservation of its
molecular autopoiesis. The different processes of molecular productions that compose the
closed network of cyclical molecular processes of molecular productions that a living
system is, constitutes a coherent and harmonious systems by means of free or fix molecules
that trigger, enhance or inhibit their respective activities integrating them as a totality. In
their long evolutionary drift living systems, since their origin some 3800 million years ago,
have constituted a biosphere integrated by millions of different kinds of living systems that
modulate each other’s living and death through a continuous flow of molecules that results
harmonious while the diversity of living systems is conserved. We human beings with our
knowledge and technological abilities are a curious danger for the biosphere and ourselves
if we fall in the metaphysical temptation of the desire of control of the course of our living
and of the natural drift of the biosphere.
5 Part 5: Ethical Reflections
The validity of all that we say in this essay stands on the sensory–operational–relational
coherences of our realization as molecular autopoietic systems in our daily living as human
beings that operate as reflective persons doing all that we do and can do in our cultural
present. And we do all that we do as we move in our daily living from home chores to
science, technology, art, philosophy, child bearing or poetry as different manners of
realizing our molecular autopoiesis alone as individuals or with others as social beings.
And we have done all our reflections without using any metaphysical explanatory
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principle, operating only in the domain of our sensory, operational and relational coher-
ences. The different human experiences that we live are different aspects of the diversity of
manners of living that we generate or may generate as we realize our individual living in
the social and not social dynamic ecological niches that appear with us as we happen being
molecular autopoietic systems. We may call the different kinds of experiences that we live,
spiritual, material, aesthetic, ethical, moral, demoniacal, good, bad, cosmic, local … and it
does not matter what experiences we live, what matters is what we do with them as
reflective loving human beings Homo sapiens-amans amans, in the different dynamic
ecological organism-niche unities that we happen to generate at every instant, alone or
with others in the realization of our living.
In other words, what matters is our understanding of what we are doing and of what we
wish to conserve in the course of living the different worlds that we generate as we live.
We human beings are the only self-conscious loving ethical living being that we so far
know on the earth, and may be that we will know in the cosmos that we generate as we
explain the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living with
the sensory–operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living in the indi-
vidual or collective dynamic ecological organisms-niche unities that we live.
We initiated the reflections that we have present in this essay with the observation that
as living beings appeared on the earth in the spontaneous arising of molecular autopoietic
systems, they must have appeared together with the condition of the medium that made
them possible as their dynamic ecological niche. In other words, we are saying that the
spontaneous arising of living beings as molecular autopoietic systems could only have
happened with the simultaneous arising of ‘‘love’’ as the individual relational dynamics
that made possible for each organism the spontaneous constitution its ecological niche as
the dynamic domain of the realization of the continuous now of its existence. The word
love connotes in our human daily living interpersonal sensory, operational and relational
dynamics that occur without demands, without expectations, without assumptions and
without prejudices, (Maturana and Verden-Zöller 2008; Maturana and Dávila 2008) which
is the only ambience in which organisms exist and can exist in the realization of their
living. Frequently it is said that feelings, emotions, love … are not scientific themes
because they are subjective, not objective happenings, but to say so is a great mistake.
Science12 occurs as we describe and explain the coherences of what we do in the real-
ization of our living with the coherences of what we do in the realization of our living
satisfying the criterion of scientific explanations, criterion that can be used in any domain
in which we may have a question for which we want an explanation. If we do not
understand this we do not understand science, philosophy, technology, art, morals, social
relations, ethics… Accordingly, love, the spontaneous relational dynamics that makes
possible the happening of the dynamic ecological niche in which an organism exists, is the
fundament of the coherences of all that happens in the spontaneity of ‘‘nature’’; the
negation of ‘‘love’’ always appears in the worlds that we humans generate as we live them
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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when we want to control the lives of other human beings, other living beings, or nature in
general.
The unfortunate happening is that, as we want to control nature we lose understanding
of the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that we integrate, and we begin to lose the
social well-being and ethical harmony of the spontaneous coherence with our domain of
existence in the realization of our living. And as that happens we fall in the metaphysical
temptation of wanting the certainty of a transcendental control in the attempt to recover it
through more control, generating more disharmonies as we lose our understanding of our
ecological living. What kind of coexistence do we want to live? What kind of dynamic
ecological individual and collective niche we want to generate and integrate as we realize
the anthroposphere–biosphere that we generate and inhabit as we live as reflective human
beings? Do we want the harmony that arises as we collaborate in a common project of
coexistence in the anthroposphere–biosphere that arises as our extended ecological niche,
acting in the spontaneous mutual respect and understanding of love that can arise with what
we do as we enjoy what we do with others?
In these circumstances what matters is what we chose to conserve as we always do in
our living what we want to do; even when we say that we do not want to do what we are
doing, we do what we do because we want to conserve something not apparent in that
moment. What do we want to conserve in our living as human beings that exist as persons
that know that they know that they generate the worlds that they live as they live them?
This is the fundamental ethical question in our human living. An ethical concern occurs
when we reflect on the possible consequences of what we do, and we realize that we do not
want any negative consequences on other human beings, other living beings, and the
ecological domain in which we exist, or the biosphere that makes us possible and we chose
to act so that nothing of that kind occurs. There are no different ethics for different domains
o human activities. The fundament of ethical concerns is love, and if we speak different
ethics the most likely thing is that we are justifying some discrimination.
6 Part 6: Epilogue
6.1 Spontaneous Ethical Being
In our transitory existence that occurs with a beginning and an end, there are three
questions that always remain unanswered, and that are: (1) what are the initial conditions
for the possibility that all that happens in our domain of existence, may happen? (2) Is it
possible that we human beings that exist as languaging reflective beings that exist with a
beginning and an end in the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that we integrate
may be able to answer the first question? And, (3) Are the answers to these three questions
of any relevance for our understanding of the nature of our living as molecular autopoietic
beings?
If we do not want metaphysical answers, the answers to these three questions are the
following:
Whatever answer we human observer give to these questions will necessarily occur in
the domain in which we exist and operate as molecular autopoietic systems. That is, any
answer that we may propose for question (1) will have the form: All the conditions that
make possible the molecular domain must take place as operations in a sub molecular
generative domain that makes possible the arising of the molecular domain. Such sub
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molecular domain must necessarily exist in the same fundamental sensory, operational and
relational domain in which we make all our cognitive statements as molecular autopoietic
systems as we operate as human observers, including our distinction of ourselves as
molecular autopoietic systems: that is, we can speak about such sub molecular domain
only to the extent that it appears in our distinctions through what we do in the sensory–
operational–relational domain that is our domain cognition as molecular autopoietic
systems.
Therefore, whatever answer we give to question (1) will take place as an operation that
we perform as molecular autopoietic systems in the molecular domain in which we exist as
such, and whatever answer that we may give pretending that has a transcendental foun-
dation will be an explanatory invention that attempts to put us operating outside the
molecular domain of our existing as molecular autopoietic systems. Cosmology as it
appears as we explain the coherences of the realization of our living with the coherences of
the realization of our living, shows the sub-molecular generative processes that would have
generated the molecular domain in which we have arisen as molecular autopoietic systems:
we exist in the sensory–operational–relational domain that arises as we operate as totali-
ties, and what happens to us and with us as human beings does not belong to the sub
molecular domain although this may affect our molecularity.
The answer to question (2) is implicit in the answer that we gave to question (1) because
in it we say that whatever we may propose in our answers to all questions will of necessity
take place in the domain in which we operate as human beings as we happen in the
realization of our molecular autopoiesis. In other words, the answer to question (2) is yes
to the extent that we do not want to invent a transcendental answer founded on a tran-
scendental domain of which we cannot speak.
The answer to question (3) is that the answers to questions (1) and (2) are irrelevant for
the understanding of the nature of living because we already understand that the hap-
pening of living occurs in the realization of the biological domain as the domain of
dynamic sensorial–operational–relational existence that arises with the spontaneous
happening of molecular autopoiesis, and that the human domain arises in the sensory–
operational–relational domain in which living systems operate as totalities as languaging
human beings.
The reflections just presented leave us again with the first question, question that has
fascinated humanity since many generations ago, and that in the present fascinates many
scientists, particularly physicists that search for a unique cause for everything. But now
we are aware that we know that any answer that we may propose to the question about
the origin of everything will necessarily take place in the sensory–operational–relational
domain of the realization of our living as molecular autopoietic systems as we operate as
totalities in our human domain as languaging beings, precisely because we are molecular
autopoietic systems, and everything that we do occurs in that domain. However, we are
now also aware that if we were to insist in explaining our living and what we do in our
living with some fundaments that do not belong to the molecular domain in which we
exist as molecular autopoietic systems, we can do so only inventing some ad hoc
transcendental metaphysical generative principle that we choose to accept. The good
thing is that we now also know that if we were to propose some transcendental notion in
order to explain the origin of everything, that notion will necessarily be a metaphysical
invention in the domain of our realization as molecular autopoietic systems in our human
domain.
Nonetheless, if we dare to accept that we now know that the question about the origin of
everything that happens in our living cannot be answered by making reference to some
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fundaments that do not belong to the molecular domain that arises as we explain what we
do and how we do what we do in our living with what we do in the realization of our living
as molecular autopoietic systems, we are free to choose what path we wish to follow. We
are free to choose, either to accept that all that there is occurs in our doings and in our
explaining our doings as human beings in the realization of our molecular autopoiesis, or to
accept that the fundament of all that we do occurs in an invented transcendental domain
that lies beyond the domain of what we do, and that it may be whatever we choose it to be.
And we are now also aware that whatever we choose in this dilemma will guide our living
and what we do until we change, and decide something else while we can reflect on what
we think and do. Whatever we chose is a legitimate choice provides we do not become
fundamentalists and lose our ethical concerns. Love is in every case the fundament for
anything to happen in our living. even when we deny it.
The path that we (the authors) choose here to follow to answer the questions about the
fundaments of all that we do, is that of accepting that all that we do occurs in the sensorial–
operational–relational coherences of the cosmos that arises as we explain the sensorial–
operational–relational coherences of the realization of our living as reflecting languaging
human beings with the sensorial–operational–relational coherences of the realization of our
living as molecular autopoietic systems.
Therefore, we chose to accept the consequences of our finding and of our understanding
through our explaining of our living with our living, that shows that all that there is in our
living occurs as the dynamic ecological organism-niche unity that we integrate as the
cosmos that arises as the domain in which occurs our living as human beings as we explain
our living with our living as a spontaneous dynamic molecular architectures. And in doing
this we choose as well to accept that whatever we may wish to call reality in our cultural
present, is in fact all that which we live through all that we do as molecular autopoietic
systems in the dynamic ecological niche unity that we integrate in the realization of our
living as reflective languaging human beings.
In these circumstances, and according to what we have already said, even that which
some person may wish to call transcendental would occur, if it occurs in some aspect of his
or her living is necessarily as an aspect of the reality that he or her happens to live as a
molecular autopoietic systems in the dynamic ecological spontaneous architecture of the
organism-niche unity that he or she integrates in the realization of his or her living. So,
whatever we do in our living as reflective human beings always arises in one way or other
according to what we consciously or unconsciously conserve in the realization of our
living, in a process that gives or negates meaning to our living. Reality is whatever we live
in our daily living, and will have one character or another depending on how we live and
what we conserve in the realization of our living
What do we want to conserve?
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Heinz von Foerster. Kybernetes: The International Journal of Systems and Cybernetics, 34(1–2),
54–88.
Maturana, H. R. (2007). Systemic versus genetic determination. Constructivist Foundations, 3(1), 21–26.
Maturana, H. R., & Dávila, X. P. (2008). Habitar humano: en seis ensayos de biologı́a-cultural. Chile: Juan
Carlos Sáez Editorial.
Maturana, H. R., Dávila, X. P. (2015). El árbol del vivir (The tree of living). MVP-Matriztica editorial.
Maturana, H. R., & Mpodozis, J. (2000). The origin of species by means of natural drift. Revista Chilena de
Historia Natural, 73, 261–310.
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1980). Autopoiesis and cognition: The realization of the living. Boston
studies in the philosophy of sciences (Vol. 42). Boston: D. Riedel Publishing Co.
Maturana, H. R., & Varela, F. J. (1984) El Árbol del Conocimiento: Las Bases Biológicas del Conocer
Humano (1a Edición, p. 10a). Santiago: Editorial Universitaria.
Maturana, H. R, & Verden-Zöller, G. (2008). The origin of humanness in the biology of love. In P. Brunnel
(Ed.), Exeter, UK: Imprint Academic.
Humberto Maturana R. PhD in Biology at Harvard University. Co-founder, researcher and professor of
Matrı́ztica, also he is emeritus professor in the University of Chile. He is co-founded also of the first science
faculty of Chile; to his laboratory he called Neurobiology and experimental epistemology. In 1994 he
received the national science award. She studied medicine and biology and he created the notion of
Autopoiesis a manner to understand living beings among another concept that have been used in many
different ambits of the human knowledge.
Ximena Dávila Yáñez Co-founder, researcher and professor of Matrı́ztica. She studied human and family
relations, specializing in work relations. Over the last years, she has developed her vision of the biological–
cultural nature of humanness in particular, focused in the domain of human relations in order to understand
how relational pain and suffering arises and how a person can come out of it. Following this path, she has
developed the understanding and praxis of what she calls liberating conversations, in the field of therapy,
that is manner of generate autonomy and self-respect releasing the pain and suffering through conversation
understating that this one is the mechanism of the world(s) that we lives and live together.
Simón Ramı́rez Muñoz researcher, professor and assistant manager of projects of Matrı́ztica. He studied
biology in Chile. His career as focused as student of Humberto and Ximena in the domain of biology and
cultural-biology. And his main preoccupation has been the understating of humanness (observer), evolution
(natural drift), and the impact that such comprehension have in the different field as daily living, science etc.
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Cultural-Biology: Systemic Consequences

of Our Evolutionary Natural Drift as

Humberto Maturana R., Ximena Dávila

Found Sci (2016) 21:631-678

Cultural-Biology: Systemic Consequences of Our

Humberto Maturana R.1 • Ximena Dávila Yáñez1 •

Simón Ramı́rez Muñoz1

Published online: 28 September 2015

& Humberto Maturana R.

of manners of living produced in biological evolution is the result of differential survival in

Keywords Humanness ! Cognition ! Evolution ! Living beings ! Epistemology ! Reality

1 Part 1: Where Do We Living Beings Exist?

molecular autopoietic system as the sensorial–operational–relational dynamics that makes

1.2 Systemic Laws

1.3 Existence,5 Reality and Fundamental Inertia

1.4 Dynamic Ecological Organism-Niche Unity

In biology when an observer distinguishes a single living being or a collection of living

operational–relational dynamics in which they conserve their respective independent

1.5 Domains of Existence of Living Beings

1.6 Dynamic Ecological Niche

1.7 Different Manners of Living: Different Dynamic Ecological Niches

1.8 How Do We Human Beings Exist?

1.9 Molecular Domain: Operational Fundament of Everything

As we distinguish ourselves through our operations of distinctions, we find ourselves

1.10 Natural Drift

The evolution of living systems occurs as a process of generation and conservation of

1.11 Where Do We Exit as Reflective Observers?

A living being exists in the sensory–operational–relational domain that it integrates as the

2 Part 2: How are We Made?

2.1 Dynamic Architectures (1)

As we speak of an organism we refer to its manner of constitution as a molecular

of a dynamic ecological organism-niche unity. Moreover, as that reproductive manner of

2.2 Dynamic Architecture (2)

(a) When an observer distinguishes a composite entity11 as it operates as a totality, he or

2.3 Spontaneous Architectures

2.4 Ontogenic Architecture: From a Stem-Cell-Niche Unity on

galaxies, … to molecular autopoietic systems, cultures … depending on the moment of the

3 Part 3: Epistemological Reflections

3.1 Nature of Reality

very powerful explanatory invention that has constituted an ordering epistemological

3.2 Nature of Our Conceptual Difficulties

reflections adds is sensory–operational–relational domains that are only possible to lan-

3.3 Nature of the Unity Organism-Nervous System

3.4 Nature of the Act of Knowing

3.5 Nature of Self-Consciousness

When we speak of self-consciousness we usually speak as if we were referring to some

3.6 Nature of Our Sensory, Operational and Relational Existence

We operate as dynamically closed molecular autopoietic systems. Our nervous system as a

sensoriality of doings that I am living. As we experience seeing, touching, hearing thinking

3.7 Nature of the Ontogenic Phenotype

The process of embryonic transformation happens as a dynamic architecture that occurs in

4 Part 4: Metaphysical Temptations

4.1 Existence Beyond Existing

4.2 Explanatory Principles

We as scientific usually say that we live in a probabilistic universe, because we cannot

probabilities. We think that in that statement there is an epistemological confusion. In a

4.5 Progress and Intentionality

In our cultural present we speak of progress to refer to a transformation whose outcome

4.7 Genes, Genetic Determination

developmental and relational processes as well as a molecular visualization of the dynamic

4.8 Molecular Manipulations

A living being exists as a dynamic self-assembling molecular architecture that realizes

5 Part 5: Ethical Reflections

6.1 Spontaneous Ethical Being