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Humberto Maturana

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Humberto Maturana
Maturana in 2015
Born
Humberto Augusto Gastón Maturana Romesín

(1928-09-14)September 14, 1928
Santiago, Chile
DiedMay 6, 2021(2021-05-06) (aged 92)
Santiago, Chile
EducationUniversity of Chile; University College London; Harvard University
Known forAutopoiesis, structural coupling, biology of cognition
AwardsNational Prize for Natural Sciences (1994)
Scientific career
FieldsBiology, philosophy
WorkplacesUniversity of Chile; Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Instituto de Formación Matríztica
ThesisThe fine structure of the optic nerve and tectum of anurans; an electron microscope study (1958)
George B. Chapman
Doctoral students
Rafael E. Núñez

Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher.[1] Some name him a second-order cybernetics theoretician alongside the likes of Heinz von Foerster, Gordon Pask, Herbert Brün and Ernst von Glasersfeld.

Maturana, along with Francisco Varela and Ricardo B. Uribe, was known for creating the term "autopoiesis" about the self-generating, self-maintaining structure in living systems, and concepts such as structural determinism and structural coupling.[2] His work was influential in many fields, mainly the field of systems thinking and cybernetics. Overall, his work is concerned with the biology of cognition.[3] Maturana (2002) insisted that autopoiesis exists only in the molecular domain, and he did not agree with the extension into sociology and other fields:

The molecular domain is the only domain of entities that through their interactions give rise to an open ended diversity of entities (with different dynamic architectures) of the same kind in a dynamic that can give rise to an open ended diversity of recursive processes that in their turn give rise to the composition of an open ended diversity of singular dynamic entities.[4]

Early in his career, Maturana worked with Jerome Lettvin at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on the physiology of vision in the frog, work that contributed to the paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain". He later returned to Chile, where he spent most of his academic career at the University of Chile. He received the National Prize for Natural Sciences in 1994.[5]

Early life

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Maturana was born in Santiago, Chile.[6] He was raised by his mother, Olga Romesín, a social worker at a polyclinic in Santiago, who separated from his father, Alejandro Maturana, when Humberto was one or two years old. He later recalled that his mother taught him from an early age to wash, cook and knit, tasks then considered women's work. Following the death of his grandmother, when he was about eleven, his mother stopped taking him and his brother to Mass and taught them about the nuances of good and evil and the nonexistence of original sin. Accompanying his mother on a home visit to the Punta de Rieles neighborhood in Macul, he saw the extreme poverty of a woman and a young child, after which he stopped believing in God.[7]

At age twelve he contracted pulmonary tuberculosis, which kept him at rest for three years and in hospital for a further two. He used this confinement to read, including Friedrich Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, even though reading was forbidden during his rest cure. As a game and a way of coping with his illness, he asked doctors at the Hospital del Salvador to call him "Irigoitía" rather than "Humberto", and later, at the sanatorium in Putaendo, to call him "Tubal-cain", after the biblical descendant of Cain. In this way, he thought, the patient was not himself but the characters he created. He recovered just as he began medical school, thanks to the arrival of streptomycin, the first antibiotic effective against the disease.[7]

After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de Salas in 1947,[5] he enrolled at the University of Chile, studying first medicine in Santiago, then biology in London and Cambridge, Mass.[8] Although he did not complete his medical degree,[7] he was a teaching assistant in the biology course taught by Professor Gabriel Gasic.

Career

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Anatomy and physiology

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In 1954, he obtained a scholarship from the Rockefeller Foundation to study anatomy and neurophysiology with J. Z. Young (the "discoverer" of the squid giant axon and who later wrote the foreword to The Tree of Knowledge) at University College London.[5] Maturana wrote that he was an "invisible" student never officially accepted in University College, London. Nonetheless, he did research and produced a paper[9] investigating the possibility of the presence of efferent fibers running from the brain to the retina. In this study, he unilaterally severed optic nerves of toads who were maintained weeks to months post-surgery. Maturana then examined the ocular and brain stumps of the cut nerves using the conventional Weigert's and Holmes's nerve fiber staining methods and although "thin", concluded that efferent fibers existed. Amphibians, unlike avian and reptile species, lacked a distinct isthmo-optic nucleus located in the caudal part of the midbrain with direct connections to the retina.

Maturana then went to Harvard for his PhD work with George B. Chapman as his advisor. Chapman's speciality was cell biology and ultrastructure. Maturana produced a PhD thesis in 1958 and a research paper on the amphibian optic nerve.[10] Why he did this particular work is not clear. Chapman was a cytologist using ultrastructural methods. He never worked on frogs or optic nerves even during his later distinguished career at Georgetown University. However, at MIT, down the street from Harvard, Jerome Lettvin was electrophysiologically recording from the frog optic nerve. Maturana made contact with Lettvin through J. Z. Young (who knew Lettvin and colleagues from work they carried out at the Zoological Station in Naples, Italy). Maturana's thesis revealed the frog optic nerve contains thirty times more fibers than previously estimated.[11] Most of the fibers are unmyelinated and collectively the number of optic nerve fibers is around 500,000. He found that the number of fibers in the optic nerve approximately matches the number of ganglion cells in the retina.

Work at MIT

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Maturana formally joined Lettvin's laboratory at MIT's Research Laboratory of Electronics (RLE) as a post-doctoral fellow, working there from 1958 to 1960.[5] The details from his thesis about the frog optic nerve were useful for subsequent physiological studies. Maturana and Lettvin recorded electrical activity in the frog optic nerve and in the midbrain optic tectum, the principal target of the retina. They found that the unmyelinated optic nerve fibers terminate in the most superficial layers of the tectum and the myelinated optic nerve fibers terminate in layers below. Several sets of optic nerve fibers form visuotopic maps of visual space in the tectum. They published the paper "What the Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain"[12] with Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts, also at MIT, that became extensively cited and may have been one of the earliest papers in the realm of neuroethology.

Their work was distinguished from other similar studies at the time by using "natural" visual stimuli rather than spots of light of various sizes and durations. They discovered five physiological types of retinal ganglion cells. Four of these five types are restricted to an individual layer of the tectum. One of these types is insensitive to spots of light but are exquisitely sensitive to small, dark, convexly-shaped moving objects that they dubbed "bug detectors". Lettvin and Maturana carried out the physiological and anatomical experiments and McCulloch and Pitts, famed for earlier theoretical work modeling neurons and neural networks and for epistemological approaches to the recognition of universals, provided theoretical rigor.

Maturana, as first author, co-wrote a longer paper elaborating on the results of the frog's eye paper.[13] The MIT group also produced a brief but notable physiological paper on regeneration of cut frog optic nerve fibers and showed they grow back to their original tectal locations.[14] They also produced a paper describing two classes of visually evoked tectal cells. One class responded primarily to novel visual stimuli ("newness" cells); the other class responded best to stimuli repeatedly presented ("sameness" cells).

Maturana followed his anuran studies with studies in pigeon vision [15][16] and with Lettvin and Wall, one of the first electrophysiological studies in octopus.[17] After a 2 year post-doctoral period at MIT, he returned to Chile in 1960.

University of Chile

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Maturana was appointed Assistant Prof in Dept of Biology of Medical School of University of Chile Santiago, at the age of 32. In 1965 he became a full professor in the Department of Biology of the university's Faculty of Sciences.[5] He worked in neuroscience at the University of Chile, in the Biología del Conocer (Biology of Knowing) research center. During the 1970s, he developed the concept of autopoiesis, which he had had in mind for some years, together with his former teaching assistant Francisco Varela.[5] Maturana's work has been developed and integrated into the work on ontological coaching developed by Fernando Flores and Julio Olalla.

In 1992, together with the biologist Jorge Mpodozis, Maturana proposed that species evolve through "natural drift". The idea rests on a neutralist conception in which the way the members of a lineage realize their autopoiesis is conserved across generations as a particular ontogenic phenotype, which depends on the lineage's history of interactions, and whose innovation leads to the diversification of lineages.[18]

Later career

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In 1994, he received Chile's National Prize for Natural Sciences,[19] awarded for his research in the biological sciences, specifically on visual perception in vertebrates, and for contributions to the theory of knowledge oriented toward education, communication and ecology.[5]

In 1997, while still teaching at the University of Chile, Maturana met the family counselor Ximena Dávila, whose idea that pain has a cultural origin drew his attention.[7] In 2000 the two founded the Instituto de Formación Matríztica (Matríztica Institute), a reflection and research center that describes its purpose as accompanying people, communities and organizations in their processes of cultural transformation and integration.[20] In 2020, he was awarded an honorary fellowship by the Cybernetics Society.

Politics

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In 1988, Maturana was one of the founders of the political movement Independientes por el Consenso Democrático (Independents for Democratic Consensus), which took part in the campaign for the 1988 plebiscite on the continuation of the military government in Chile.[21]

Work

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Maturana, 2012
A drawing in zero time

Maturana's research interests concern concepts like cognition, autopoiesis, languaging, zero time cybernetics and structurally determined systems. Maturana's work extends to philosophy, cognitive science and even family therapy. He was inspired by the work of the biologist Jakob von Uexküll.

His inspiration for his work in cognition is said to have come from the time he spent reflecting on his illness and on the nature of life during his long confinement with tuberculosis. What he came to realize was "that what was peculiar to living systems was that they were discrete autonomous entities such that all the processes that they lived, they lived in reference to themselves ... whether a dog bites me or doesn't bite me, it is doing something that has to do with itself." This paradigm of autonomy formed the basis of his studies and work.[3]

Autopoiesis and the biology of cognition

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Maturana and his student Francisco Varela were the first to define and employ the concept of "autopoiesis", which was Maturana's original idea. The concept describes the internal organization of living systems as closed systems that continuously produce the components that constitute them. Aside from making important contributions to the field of evolution, Maturana is associated with an epistemology built upon empirical findings in neurobiology. Maturana and Varela wrote "Living systems are cognitive systems, and living as a process is a process of cognition. This statement is valid for all organisms, with or without a nervous system."[22] On this foundation Maturana laid the groundwork for what he called the "biology of cognition", a discipline that seeks to explain the operation of living beings as closed systems determined by their structure.

Objectivity in parentheses

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Another important aspect of Maturana's reflections is an invitation to shift the question of "being", which presupposes an objective reality independent of the observer, to the question of "doing". This shift takes as its starting point what he called "objectivity in parentheses": objects are "brought forth" through the operations of distinction performed by the observer, understood as any human being operating in language.

Reflections on life and association with Francisco Varela

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In an article in Constructivist Foundations. Maturana described the origins of the concept of autopoiesis and his collaboration with Varela.[23]

Personal life

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Maturana married María Montañez, a medical student who later became a physician and psychiatrist, in Chile. Their first son, Marcelo, who became an editor and writer, was born in London in 1955, and a second son, Alejandro, who became an engineer, was born around 1959. Maturana and Montañez lived together for about twenty years.[5][7] Around 1978 he began a relationship with Beatriz Genzsch that lasted thirty-five years until her death in 2013; he grieved at his country property in Lo Cañas and later lived in the home of his friend and collaborator Ximena Dávila.[7] In 1999 he had a third son, Vicente, with the psychologist Valeria Gálvez.[7]

Honors and awards

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Death

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Maturana died in Santiago on May 6, 2021, at age 92, due to pneumonia.[26][27]

Selected works

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Articles on anatomy and physiology

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  • 1958 H.R. Maturana Efferent fibres in the optic nerve of the toad (Bufo bufo) J. Anat Jan 92 : 21-27. [ He thanked JZ Young "for always valuable criticism and friendly encouragement." On the paper his institutional address is Dept. Anatomy University College, London. With present address Biological Laboratory, Harvard University, Cambridge Mass.]
  • 1959 Humberto R Maturana The Fine Anatomy of the optic nerve of anurans – an electron microscope study. Journal of Biophysical and Biochemical Cytology 7 107-120 [Present address: Research Laboratory of Electronics, MIT "My appreciation to Professor G.B. Chapman under whom this work was done as a doctoral thesis"]
  • 1959 Maturana, H.R. Number of Fibres in the Optic Nerve and the number of Ganglion Cells in the Retina of Anurans Nature 183 1406-1407.
  • 1959 J.Y. Lettvin, H.R. Maturana, W. S. McCulloch. W.H. Pitts What the Frog's Eye Tells The Frog's Brain Proceedings of the IRE 47: 1940-1951.
  • 1960 H.R. Maturana, J.Y. Lettvin, W. S. McCulloch. W.H. Pitts Anatomy and Physiology of Vision in the frog (Rana pipiens). J. General Physiology 43 129-175.
  • 1959 H.R. Maturana, J.Y. Lettvin, W. S. McCulloch. W.H. Pitts Evidence that cut optic nerve fibers grow back to original location. Science 130: 1709-10.
  • 1960 J. Y. Lettvin, H. R. Maturana, W. H. Pitts, W. S. McCulloch Two Remarks on the Visual System of the Frog [In MIT Press publication, 'Sensory Communications'].
  • 1963 H.R. Maturana and S. Frenk Directional movement and horizontal edge detectors in the pigeon retina Science 142 977-979.
  • 1965 H.R. Maturana and S. Frenk Synaptic connections of the centrifugal fibers in the pigeon retina. Science 150 359-361 1965.
  • 1965 Boycott BB, Lettvin JY, Maturana HR, Wall PD Octopus optic responses Experimental Neurology, 12, 247-256.
  • 1968 Maturana, H, G. Uribe, S. Frenk A biological theory of relativistic colour coding in the primate retina Arch Biol Med Exp. 1:1-30
  • 1970 Varela, FG, Maturana, HR Time courses of excitation and inhibition in retinal ganglion cells. Experimental Neurology
  • 1970 H.R. Maturana, F. Varela and S. Frenk Size Constancy and the Perception of Space Cognition I (I), pp. 97–104. 1972

Philosophy

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The initial paper which stands as a prelude to all that followed:

  • Biology of Cognition Archived 2009-09-17 at the Wayback Machine. Humberto R. Maturana. Biological Computer Laboratory Research Report BCL 9.0. Urbana IL: University of Illinois, 1970. As Reprinted in: Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. Dordecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1980, pp. 5–58.

Books

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  • 1972 De máquinas y seres vivos: una teoría sobre la organización biológica. With Francisco Varela. Santiago: Editorial Universitaria. (Reprinted in 1997 as Máquinas e seres vivos: autopoiese, a organização do vivo, Porto Alegre: Artes Médicas.)
  • 1980 Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living. With Francisco Varela. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science). ISBN 90-277-1015-5.
  • 1984 El árbol del conocimiento: Las bases biológicas del entendimiento humano. With Francisco Varela. English edition: The Tree of Knowledge: Biological Roots of Human Understanding, revised edition 1992. ISBN 978-0-87773-642-4
  • 1990 Emociones y lenguaje en educación y política.
  • 1990 Biology of Cognition and epistemology. Ed Universidad de la Frontera. Temuco, Chile.
  • 1991 El sentido de lo humano. With Sima Nisis de Rezepka.
  • 1992 Conversations with Humberto Maturana: Questions to biologist Psychotherapist. With K. Ludewig. Ed Universidad de la Frontera. Temuco, Chile. 1992.
  • 1992 La objetividad: un argumento para obligar. Santiago de Chile: Ed Dolmen. (1997 edition.)
  • 1993 Amor y juego: fundamentos olvidados de lo humano desde el patriarcado a la democracia. With Gerda Verden-Zöller.
  • 1994 Reflections and Conversations. With Kurt Ludewig. Collection Family Institute. FUPALI Ed. Cordova. 1994
  • 1994 La democracia es una obra de arte (Democracy is a Work of Art). Collection Roundtable. Linotype Ed Bogota Bolivar y Cia.
  • 1995 Desde la biología a la psicología (From biology to psychology). With Jorge Luzoro García.
  • 1995–1996 La realidad: ¿objetiva o construida? 2 vols.
  • 1999 De l'origine des espèces par voie de la dérive naturelle.
  • 2004 From Being to Doing: The Origins of the Biology of Cognition. With Bernhard Pörksen.
  • 2007 The Origin of Humanness in the Biology of Love. With Gerda Verden-Zöller. Edited by Pille Bunnell. Exeter UK: Imprint Academic. (Reissued 2012 by Philosophy Documentation Center, Charlottesville VA.)
  • 2008 Habitar humano en seis ensayos de biología-cultural. With Ximena Dávila.
  • 2015 El árbol del vivir. With Ximena Dávila.
  • 2019 Historia de nuestro vivir cotidiano. With Ximena Dávila.
  • 2021 La revolución reflexiva. With Ximena Dávila.

Film

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  • 2019 – El maestro Humberto Maturana (short documentary), appearing as himself.

See also

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References

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  1. ↑ "Death of the philosopher who defined life". theecologist.org. May 26, 2021.
  2. ↑ Maturana, Humberto & Varela, Francisco ([1st edition 1973] 1980). Autopoiesis and Cognition: the Realization of the Living, in Robert S. Cohen and Marx W. Wartofsky (Eds.), Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 42. Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co. ISBN 90-277-1015-5 (hardback), ISBN 90-277-1016-3 (paper)
  3. 1 2 Magnus Ramage, Karen Shipp (2012) Systems Thinkers
  4. ↑ Maturana, H.R. (2002). "Autopoiesis, structural coupling and cognition: A history of these and other notions in the biology of cognition". Cybernetics and Human Knowing. 9: 5–34.
  5. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Facultad de Medicina y Memoria Chilena. "Humberto Maturana Romecín" (in Spanish). University of Chile. Retrieved November 21, 2017.
  6. ↑ Latina, Prensa. "Humberto Maturana: Un nuevo aniversario de su nacimiento". El Naveghable.cl, Noticias de Valdivia y Los Ríos (in Spanish).
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 García, Gabriela (October 19, 2018). "Maturana a los 90: "Me voy a morir antes de ser viejo"" (in Spanish). La Tercera. Retrieved October 20, 2018.
  8. ↑ Vicuña, Alfredo Erlwein (November 25, 2021). "Humberto Maturana: pensamiento para la ciencia y la conciencia mundiales". The Conversation.
  9. ↑ Maturana, H.R. (1958). "Efferent fibres in the optic nerve of the toad (Bufo bufo)". J. Anat. 92: 21–27. PMID 13513493.
  10. ↑ Maturana, H.R. (1960). "The fine anatomy of the optic nerve of anurans: an electron microscope study". J. Cell Biol. 7: 107–120.
  11. ↑ Maturana, H.R. (1959). "Number of fibres in the optic nerve and the number of ganglion cells in the retina of anurans". Nature. 183: 1406–1407.
  12. ↑ Lettvin, J. Y.; Maturana, H.R.; McCulloch, W. S.; Pitts, W. H. (1959). "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain". Proceedings of the IRE. 47: 1940–1951.
  13. ↑ Maturana, H.R.; Lettvin, J. Y.; McCulloch, W. S.; Pitts, W. H. (1960). "Anatomy and physiology of vision in the frog (Rana pipiens)". J. Gen. Physiol. 43: 129–175. doi:10.1085/jgp.43.6.129. PMC 2195076.
  14. ↑ Maturana, H.R.; Lettvin, J. Y.; McCulloch, W. S.; Pitts, W. H. (1959). "Evidence that cut optic nerve fibers in a frog regenerate to their proper places in the tectum". Science. 130: 1709–1710.
  15. ↑ Maturana, H.R. (1962). "Functional organization of the pigeon retina". Proceedings of the International Union of Physiological Sciences: XXII. pp. 170–178.
  16. ↑ Maturana, H.R.; Frenk, S. (1963). "Directional movement and horizontal edge detectors in the pigeon retina". Science. 142: 977–979.
  17. ↑ Boycott, B.B.; Lettvin, J. Y.; Maturana, H.R.; Wall, P.D. (1965). "Octopus optic responses". Exper. Neurol. 12: 247–256. doi:10.1016/0014-4886(65)90070-1.
  18. ↑ Maturana-Romesin, Humberto; Mpodozis, Jorge (June 2000). "El origen de las especies por medio de la deriva natural". Revista Chilena de Historia Natural (in Spanish). doi:10.4067/S0716-078X2000000200005.
  19. ↑ "Bernabé Santelices recibe el Premio Nacional de Ciencias Naturales" [Bernabé Santelices Receives the National Prize for Natural Sciences]. El Mercurio (in Spanish). Santiago. August 31, 2012. Retrieved December 11, 2017.
  20. ↑ "Matríztica" (in Spanish). Matríztica. Archived from the original on January 22, 2018. Retrieved January 22, 2018.
  21. ↑ "Por la Dignidad, la Democracia, por la Paz y el Futuro de Chile y los Chilenos". Archivo Alejandro Hales (in Spanish). 1988. Retrieved December 18, 2017.
  22. ↑ Maturana, Humberto R. & Varela, Francisco J. (1980): Autopoiesis and Cognition. The Realization of the Living. Dordrecht: Reidel, p. 13.
  23. ↑ "Reflections on My Collaboration with Francisco Varela". Constructivist Foundations. 7 (3): 155–163. 2012.
  24. 1 2 "Humberto Maturana recibirá grado de Doctor Honoris Causa en la Usach" (in Spanish). La Tercera. December 7, 2009. Retrieved December 20, 2017.
  25. ↑ "Humberto Maturana recibió Doctorado Honoris Causa de la Universidad de Santiago" (in Spanish). El Ciudadano. December 14, 2009. Retrieved December 20, 2017.
  26. ↑ "A los 92 años muere el destacado biólogo y escritor chileno Humberto Maturana". 24Horas.cl (in Spanish). May 6, 2021. Retrieved May 6, 2021.
  27. ↑ "Familia de Humberto Maturana revela causas de su fallecimiento: "Es un momento de gratitud y luto"". BioBioChile - La Red de Prensa Más Grande de Chile (in Spanish). May 6, 2021. Retrieved May 6, 2021.

Further reading

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