Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
11
A systemic approach to the origin of biological
organization
Alvaro Moreno
SUMMARY
I present here an analysis of the core of biological organization from a genealog-
ical perspective, trying to show which could be the driving forces or principles
of organization leading from the physico-chemical world to the biological one.
From this perspective the essential issue is to understand how new princi-
ples of generation and preservation of complexity could appear. At the begin-
ning, the driving force towards complexity was nothing but the confluence of
several principles of ordering, such as self-assembly, template replication, or
self-organization, merged in the framework of what I have called a nontrivial
self-maintaining organization. The key of this process is functional recursivity,
namely, the fact that every novelty capable of contributing to a more efficient
form of maintenance will be recruited. This leads us to the central concept of
autonomy, defined as a form of self-constructing organization, which maintains
its identity through its interactions with its environment. As such, autonomy
grasps the idea of (minimal) metabolic organization, which, in turn, is at the
basis of what we mean by (minimal) organism. Finally, from the concept of
autonomy, I try to show how it has generated a new and more encompassing
system in which evolution by natural selection takes over, generating in turn a
new form of individual organization (genetically instructed metabolism) erasing
the previous ones.
