Autopoiesis: Reproduction, heredity, and evolution

This is Humberto Maturana's chapter "Autopoiesis: Reproduction, Heredity, and Evolution," included in the 1980 volume "Autopoiesis, Dissipative Structures, and Spontaneous Social Orders," a collection linked to an AAAS symposium on self-organizing systems. In it, Maturana works through the concept of autopoiesis, living systems understood as self-producing, operationally closed networks, and applies it to questions of biological reproduction, heredity and evolution, laying groundwork that runs through his later collaborations with Francisco Varela. The volume is documented in the systems-theory literature as an early, influential collection linking cybernetics, self-organization and social theory. Credits: Maturana, H. (1980). Autopoiesis: Reproduction, heredity, and evolution. En Autopoiesis, dissipative structures, and spontaneous social orders (p. xxi, 149).