Born in Chile in 1928, Humberto Maturana Romesín was interested in animals and plants from childhood and wanted to be a biologist to investigate life that dies. A long period of reflection, reading Frederic Nietzsche and Julian Huxley, occurred during three years of complete bed rest.Beginning medicine in 1950, in1958 he received a Ph.D. in Biology from Harvard University. His main contributions in biology related to showing that living beings are molecular autopoietic systems, and that if one follows the consequences of the fact that living beings do not distinguish in their experience between perception and illusion, one can show that: language as a biological phenomenon occurs as a flow of living together in coordinations of coordinations of consensual behaviors; and cognition as a biological phenomenon occurs when an organism operates adequately to the circumstances of its living, conserving its autopoiesis as a consequence of the operational-relational coherences with its niche that are proper to it in the present of its living as a feature of the history of evolutionary structural drift to which it belongs. Maturana passed away on 6 May 2021.
Bloch S. & Maturana H. R. (1971) Oil droplets distribution and colour discrimination in the pigeon. Nature New Biology 234: 284–285. https://cepa.info/538
Budnik V., Mpodozis J., Varela F. J. & Maturana H. R. (1984) Regional specialization of the quail retina: Ganglion cell density and oil droplet distribution. Neuroscience Letters 51(1): 145–150. https://cepa.info/571
The ganglion cell density of the quail’s retina was studied in sections and whole mounts. Two regions of high ganglion cell density were found, corresponding to an afoveate area centralis and an area dorsalis. Oil droplets were found to be isotropically distributed throughout the retina. It is proposed that the significance of such retinal regional specialization, in comparison to similar studies in the pigeon and the chick, is that regional specialization in the avian retina is more closely related to feeding habits than to phylogenetic descendence.
Coddou F., Kunstmann G., Maturana H. R., Méndez C. L. & Montenegro H. (1995) Violencia en sus distintos ambitos de expresion. Dolmen Ediciones, Santiago.
Citations often disagree on the ordering of the authors’ names. The order cited here is as given on the front cover of the first edition.
Córdova F., Doggenweiler C., Maturana H. R., Mpodozis J., Letelier J. C. & Moyano A. (1993) Alternativas de automatización para el guiado autónomo de vehículos cargadores frontales en una mina subterránea. Automática e Innovación 2: 67–63.
Dávila X. Y. & Maturana H. R. (2007) La gran oportunidad: Fin de la psiquis del liderazgo en el surgimiento de la psiquis de la gerencia co-inspirativa. Gestión Pública: Revista Chilena de Administración Pública 10: 101–124. https://cepa.info/714
The essay proposes to replace the leadership, as a way of managing organizations, for a co-inspiring management. The authors propose we are living in a post-post modern era, whose main characteristic is that we, human beings, know what we know we know and understand what we understand we understand. This situation leads us to an ethical action-reflexion in which human beings can not run away of the consciousness and responsibility of their behaviors. In this context, human relations such as leadership are meaningless. Thus, the concept of co-inspiring management arises. This concept allows people to participate in an active and creative way in the creation and accomplishment of common projects and in the fulfillment of well-being.
Dávila X. Y. & Maturana H. R. (2009) Hacia una era post posmoderna en las comunidades educativas [Towards a post-postmodern era in educational communities]. Revista Iberoamericana de Educación 49: 135–161. https://cepa.info/723
In this essay, the authors invite us to take a different look at the fundamental phenomena of today’s education, imagining a flow of events that can orient us into following a drift that results in a reflexive transformation by the year 2021. This invitation is assumed with gravity, responsibility and boldness. Gravity, because of the reflexive precision that the authors use in their analysis; responsibility because they encourage to assume generationally the consequences of understanding education in this zero-time; and boldness because this is a proposal that allows us to shift our look into the comprehension of the cultural and biological foundations of human living. This proposal is undertaken from an unitary epistemological foundation that consciously avoids all dualistic temptation, broadening our understanding of our constitution as living creatures and as human beings, inviting us to reflect and to broaden our possibility of living in individual and social welfare, as naturally ethic and autonomous beings, capable of assuming the responsibility of being conscious of the world the we produce with our own living.
This essay is the result of our reflections over the course of many recursive conversations in the space of our collaboration at the Matriztic Institute in Santiago, Chile on the interplay of biology and culture on human living. We propose these Systemic and Meta-Systemic Laws (or Laws of Conservation) well aware that what we are saying with them also applies to the entire cosmos (from everyday living, to biology, to quantum physics and cosmology), which arises through the operational distinctions we make as human beings in our operating as observers explaining our living in the course of our living.