Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
François-Vincent Raspail, another founder of cell theory.
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This is of course also
the point of departure for the evolutionary view of organisms as beads along the
necklace of lineage. The rest of this chapter will argue that there is another, and
for systems biology more productive, answer to this question.
The fourth explanation of purpose is generally considered, especially by those
of a mechanistic bent, to be outside the realms of science. Contemporary biology
has nothing to offer on the question of the final cause of an organism. However,
I am of the opinion that pondering precisely this question will lay a path to
a philosophy of systems biology. In fact, for organisms it turns out that the
answers to the last two questions are one and the same.
Stafford Beer, cyberneticist and systems thinker, said that 'the purpose of a
system is what it does' (an idea now entrenched in the acronym POSIWID).
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If one asks 'what does an organism do?' the usual reply of biologists since
Darwin has been 'an organism evolves through natural selection'; related replies
are 'an organism reproduces', or, post-Dawkins (1989), 'an organism replicates
its genes'. The view of life that leads to these answers is perhaps most clearly
enunciated in Dobzhansky's mantra mentioned in the introductory section. How-
ever, since the 1960s another answer to the question 'what does an organism
do?' has been given with increasing frequency: 'An organism produces itself',
by which is meant that organisms constantly and autonomously rebuild or fabri-
cate themselves during their own lifetimes. In the words of Humberto Maturana
and Francisco Varela (Maturana & Varela, 1980) organisms are autopoietic.
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It is probably fair to say that, together, the 'evolutionary' and the 'autopoietic'
answer, either on their own or together, form the basis for most current def-
initions of life (Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004). Note also the convergence of
causes, alluded to in the previous paragraph, in this concept of self-fabrication:
an organism is its own efficient cause in that it autonomously fabricates itself;
but then, the purpose of an organism is to fabricate itself - it is its own final
cause.
Although the term autopoiesis is associated with Maturana and Varela, the
concept of self-fabrication has a long and venerable history, and seems to have
been first formulated explicitly by Immanuel Kant, who conceived of organisms
as dynamic, functional wholes in which all components are made by and for
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Virchow
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Beer said this many times, but never more forcefully than in his address to the University of Valladolid,
Spain in October 2001, a month after 11 September: 'According to the cybernetician, the purpose of a system
is what it does. This is a basic dictum. It stands for a bald fact, which makes a better starting point in
seeking understanding than the familiar attributions of good intentions, prejudices about expectations, moral
judgments, or sheer ignorance of circumstances'. (Beer, 2002).
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The term 'fabricate' will be used throughout instead of 'build' or 'make' or 'produce', the last being all to
often confused with 'reproduce'. 'Autopoiesis' lacks a verb-form, whereas 'fabrication' has one: a system that
fabricates itself is self-fabricating.
