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of management, determining what gets in and out of the system. The metabolic
pathways that extract energy and raw materials and then synthesize constituents
of the organism's own structure are another. Focusing on these management
processes, Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno characterize basic autonomy as
the capacity of a system to
manage
the flow of matter and energy through it so that
it can, at the same time, regulate, modify, and control: (i) internal self-constructive
processes and (ii) processes of exchange with the environment. Thus, the system
must be able to generate and regenerate all the constraints—including part of its
boundary conditions—that define it as such, together with its own particular way
of interacting with the environment.
(Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004, p. 240;
see also Ruiz-Mirazo et al., 2004, p. 330)
Moreno's notion of basic autonomy provides the appropriate complement to
Gánti's conception of the chemoton as the simplest chemical system exhibiting
the features of life. Construing the chemoton as an autonomous system requires
adopting a perspective that is implicit, but not explicit in Gánti's description of
the chemoton.
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The chemoton takes in not only matter, incorporating some of
it within itself and expelling other parts as waste, but also energy and utilizes
some of it in the various work it performs and expels the rest as waste (generally
as heat or substances with too little free energy to be useful). Biochemists were,
it is interesting to note, slow to recognize this aspect of metabolism. Until the
1930s they focused principally on the generation of animal heat (in fact, a waste
product) and the incorporation of matter into the organism. It was not until
the discovery of phosphocreatine and adenosine triphosphate (ATP) and their
linkages to the processes of glycolysis that energetic relations became a central
focus of metabolism studies (Bechtel, 2006). Although a latecomer, it is a crucial
feature of any metabolic system.
7. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS: BEYOND BASIC AUTONOMY
My focus in this paper has been on how organization is far more critical than
often recognized in mechanistic science and philosophical accounts of mech-
anistic explanation. Only by keeping a keen eye on the organization at play
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Prior to introducing the chemoton itself, Gánti makes the point about energy: 'The operation of every
machine, device, instrument - every continuously operating system - is based on energy flow. Energy enters
the system from somewhere and eventually leaves it. While it is within the system it is manipulated so that
part of it is forced to make the system operate, whereas the other part leaves the system, mainly in the form
of heat' (p. 18).
