Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
By developing mechanisms to perform operations outside the organism itself and
especially to navigate the environment, the organism can take proactive measures
to insure the needed conditions of its environment and thereby increase its ability
to maintain itself as a functioning system. It makes sense to construe these addi-
tional functions as enhancing the system's autonomy. Other ways of enhancing
the autonomy focus on the operations internal to the system. For example, by
developing ways to perform operations more efficiently, procedures for storing
energy and raw materials (or even recycling raw materials), and ways to regulate
the internal environment, the system improves its ability to maintain itself.
In considering mechanisms that enhance autonomy, we must bear in mind that
an organism must be able to construct all of these additional mechanisms itself.
Each structure specialized to perform an additional operation must be constructed
from matter and use free energy, the system recruits from its environment and
channels into the construction of the structure. Moreover, its operation requires
energy that the system has recruited and made available. From the point of
view of the autonomous system, each addition only makes sense if the benefit
it provides in terms of maintaining the system equals or exceeds the costs
of constructing and maintaining the addition. In this way, as Moreno himself
emphasizes, the notion of autonomy provides a framework to speak of function
not just as something that is done by the system but done for the system:
'
Functional
actions in this context are those that ensure the self-maintenance
and autonomy of the organization' (p. 241). As it is the organization of the
whole that is being maintained, function cannot be assessed locally but only in
the context of the whole system.
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Evolution via natural selection is a process that, over time, can develop sys-
tems with greater autonomy. Although not denying the traditional accounts of
evolution (e.g., that evolution requires mechanisms of variation and selective
retention
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), the focus on autonomous systems provides a rather different per-
spective. First, it places the organism in the central role and emphasizes that an
organism needs to be able to maintain itself as an autonomous system. Otherwise,
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The sense of function provided by focusing on organisms as autonomous systems is different from the sense
of function invoked in purely causal accounts that treat any activity of a system as its function or evolutionary
accounts that treat as functional only traits that have been selected in the past (adaptations) or traits that enable
the organism to meet current selection forces (adaptive traits).
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Ruiz-Mirazo and Moreno argue that before evolution can function to produce systems with greater autonomy,
an autocatalytic replication system independent of the catalytic metabolic system is required: 'hereditary
autonomous systems have no other possibility but to start producing two types of macromolecular components
that will take up different but complementary functions in the organization of those systems. The two types
of components (informational records and highly specific catalysts or, equivalently, genotype and phenotype)
strongly depend on each other, and their (code-mediated) complex interrelation changes profoundly the
organization of autonomous systems, at both the individual (metabolic) and the collective (ecological) level'
(Ruiz-Mirazo & Moreno, 2004, p. 251). In Ruiz-Mirazo et al. (2004, p. 330), the authors add evolutionary
potential to autonomy in characterizing living beings: '
“a living being” is any autonomous system with
open-ended evolutionary capacities
'.
