“Autopoiesis” is the explanatory principle for the organization of living systems, a concept directly applicable to the problematic issues surrounding the origins of life. Because it provides criteria by which a system may be judged as living, autopoiesis can be used to characterize a minimal living system. Once these defining characteristics have been established, we can extrapolate the conditions which would have made possible the emergence of earliest life. Because autopoiesis is a principle of organization, it provides a definition of living systems not restricted to specific mole-cules or structures – that is, to those nucleic-acid/protein/lipid cellular life forms with which we are familiar. Autopoiesis provides the conceptual and systematic framework within which any living system may be identified. In examining living systems, then, autopoiesis gives us a literally “meta-physical” view of life.

More and more, like the monasteries of the Middle Ages, today’s universities and professional societies guard their knowledge. Collusively, the university biology curriculum, the textbook publishers, the National Science Foundation review committees, the Graduate Record Examiners, and the various microbiological, evolutionary, and zoological societies map out domains of the known and knowable; they distinguish required from forbidden knowledge, subtly punishing the trespassers with rejection and oblivion; they award the faithful liturgists by granting degrees and dispersing funds and fellowships. Universities and academies, well within the boundaries of given disciplines (biology in my case), determine who is permitted to know and just what it is that he or she may know. Biology, botany, zoology, biochemistry, and microbiology departments within U. S. universities determine access to knowledge about life, dispensing it at high prices in peculiar parcels called credit hours.

Key words: grand unify theory, inclusive fitness, evolutionary stable strategy, technological civilization, autopoietic system