The success of Artificial Life depends on whether it will help solving the conceptual problems of biology. Biology may be viewed as the science of the transformation of organizations. And, yet, biology lacks a theory of organization. We use this as an example of the challenge that Artificial Life must meet. "If - as I believe - physics and chemistry are conceptually inadequate as a theoretical framework for biology, it is because they lack the concept of function, and hence that of organization. [...] [P]erhaps, therefore, we should give the [...] computer scientists more of a say in the formulation of Theoretical Biology." -- Christopher Longuet-Higgins, 1969 [29] 1 Life and the organization problem in biology There are two readings of "life": "life" as an embodied phenomenon and "life" as a concept. Foucault [20] points out that up to the end of the eighteenth century life does not exist: only living beings. Living beings are but a class in the series of all things in the world. T...

1996, at the University of Chicago on the occasion of the Dean's Symposium 1996 (Division of the Social Siences) "The Dynamic Emergence of Individuals and Cognition". This is joint work with Leo W. Buss, Department of Biology and Department of Geology and Geophysics, Yale University, New Haven CT 06520-8104 USA. 2 or vice versa The genius of the crafters of the synthesis was to abstract away the organism -- to see that the synthesis of Darwinism and Mendelism need not await a then unavailable "theory of the organism". That theory is still unavailable. Exploring its grounding is our project. A representation of chemistry for biology Any theory of biological organization must be grounded in a representation of that which organisms are composed of. The theory must be grounded in chemistry. We may picture chemistry as an informally systematized, autonomous body of knowledge at the interface between two very different tales of natu

that Varela and Maturana, now colleagues at the University of Chile, formulated their famous theory of autopoiesis (Maturana & Varela, 1973; 1980; see Varela, 1996a, for a personal recounting of this time and work). According to this theory, living systems are autonomous systems (endogenously controlled and self-organizing), and the minimal form of autonomy necessary and sufficient for characterizing biological life is autopoiesis, i.e., self-production having the form of an operationally closed, membrane-bounded, reaction network. Maturana and Varela also held that autopoiesis defines cognition in its minimal biological form as the `sense-making' capacity of life; and that the nervous system, as a result of the autopoiesis of its component neurons, is not an input-output information processing system, but rather an autonomous, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8, No. 8, 2001, pp. 66--69 operationally closed network, whose basic f