Preface

This book arose in the crossing of two paths of research and reflection in relation to the origin of humanness. The first of these was my intent to visualize and understand the evolutionary origin of humanness, and the other, that of Dr. Gerda Verden-Zöller, was her attempt to show observationally the arising of self-consciousness in the child in the early mother-child play relations. Although this book was written in 1994-96, I think that its contents are still valid now, some fifteen years later.

In my approach to the theme of evolution I had developed some unorthodox notions about the actual mechanism that drives the process of evolution that I shall summarize in the following statements (see Maturana and Mpdozis, 2000):

• The actual mechanism that drives evolution is structural drift in the conservation of both living and adaptation in the present, in an independent and continuously newly arising changing medium, not the selection of those best adapted to a preexisting medium.

• Natural selection is a consequence of natural drift, not the generative mechanism of evolution. The generative mechanism of evolution is natural drift.

• Living systems occur as discrete organisms in the medium that makes them possible.

• Adaptation is not a variable; adaptation is a relation of operational congruence between the changing organism and the changing medium in which it lives.

• If the relation of adaptation is lost, the organism dies. So an organism either slides in the medium in the path in which its living is conserved, or it dies (disintegrates).

• What is conserved in the constitution of a lineage through reproduction is adaptation, namely, the organism-niche relation in which its manner of living is realized and conserved.

• A lineage of organisms arises when a particular dynamic organism-niche relation begins to be conserved as a manner of living from one generation to the next through systemic reproduction.

• Systemic reproduction occurs as both the organization of the reproducing organism and the configuration of the medium in which it realizes its living are conserved together as a simple result of the conservation of the realization of that manner of living by the offspring of that organism. This occurs in the interplay of genetics and the behavioral preferences that guide the living of the organism in its niche. When this happens, the manner of living conserved from one generation to the next, as a particular configuration of organism-niche relations, becomes the operational dynamic center around which everything else is open to change; thus defining the class identity of the lineage through its systemic conservation.

• A lineage lasts as long as the dynamic configuration of organism-niche relation that constitutes the manner of living and defines its class identity of an organism is conserved through systemic reproduction.

• The evolutionary path that a lineage follows is the path of structural drift in which the organism-niche relation that defines it is conserved. So, if we wish to understand the origin and history of a lineage we must find the initial manner of living that began to be conserved as an organism-niche relation and the variations of that manner of living conserved as part of it in its natural drift, so that the members of that lineage live now as they live now.

• The present manner of living of the members of a lineage is the result of a history of natural drift, not an attainment of progressive improvement of its adaptation to a pre-existing medium.

Under this manner of thinking, if I wanted to see how humanness arose and has become what it is now, I had to answer the question “What manner of living (organism-niche relation) began to be conserved in our ancestors so that we live now as we live now?” These were my central reflections when I met Dr. Verden-Zöller.

What Dr. Verden-Zöller basically wanted to understand was the arising of self-consciousness in the child; and she thought that this took place in the early childhood of each child in the course of his or her intimate relation with his or her mother. Accordingly she thought that the place to research this question was during the early mother-child play relations, and she turned to study those relations in relatively isolated communities in West Germany after the war. Here I summarize in my words what I thought were her basic findings at the time we met:

• The main task in the growing child is learning his or her body, and he or she does so in the intimate and playful close contact with his or her mother.

• The worlds that the child lives arise in the mother-child relation as the child does together with his or her mother whatever they do together.

• It is in the mother-child play that the baby creates his or her self-distinctions. And he or she does so as a matter of course in the flow of his or her play in intimate body contact with his or her mother as they touch each other reciprocally, and in their handling and touching whatever they manipulate and distinguish together.

• The playfulness of the child in his or her mother-child relation becomes the operational-relational fundament for the different worlds that he or she generates along his or her whole life.

Listening to her and reflecting on her findings I became aware that she had the answer to my question. Indeed, I realized that it was the organism-niche relation defined by the conservation of the emotioning of the mother-child relations of play, as well as of variations in the manner of living around it, that guided the evolutionary course of our primate ancestors. This happened in a coexistence centered in love thus generating an ambiance in which living in languaging could arise as the manner of living whose conservation from one generation to the next in the learning of the children, constituted humanness as the basic loving manner of living that we live now. While we talked about this I wrote this little book as a daring proposition of what we thought must have been the evolutionary history of our lineage; namely, through the systemic conservation generation after generation of a manner of living in the learning of the children, and not through some fortunate series of mutations and genetic recombinations.

The conservation of a manner of living from one generation to the next in the learning and habits of the offspring of the members of a lineage through systemic reproduction both guides and co-opts all genetic variations that facilitate or realize that manner of living as an organism-niche operational-relational whole. I still consider now that this vision of the nature of the evolutionary process is valid.

When this little book was written, more that ten years ago, these ideas about evolution were not acceptable. The idea that the reproduction was a systemic process that involved the niche as well as the operational present state of the genetic system of the reproductive cells of the reproducing organism operating as an integrated whole was not easy to understand and accept. Since then biological understanding has developed and we now know that as reproduction takes place the new organism is formed in the fusion or division of active operating cells that carry with them their present state of living in the form of the network of nuclear and cytoplasmic processes that realize them in that moment of their living. Furthermore, we are now fully aware of the fact that that network of nuclear and cytoplasmic process involves all active and inactive genes as well as all the different molecules that constitute the dynamic molecular architecture of the realization of their present particular form of autopoiesis. Moreover, we biologists are also aware now that the initial systemic conditions that arise in the process of reproduction constitute only the starting point of the individual epigenetic history of the new organism, and that this epigenetic history will go one way or another according to which are the relational circumstances in which the organism realizes-conserves its autopoiesis in its organism-niche relation.

Therefore, although what we write in this little book appeared to be a daring evolutionary proposition in 1994, it now seems more than plausible. When Lamark and Darwin were in their different historical moments attempting to explain adaptation in the history of living system they thought of adaptation as a variable, and seeing the medium as a preexisting “container” to which the new organisms had to accommodate. Given this premise they felt that the happenings of the individual life histories had to have a presence in the life of their offspring. So, they proposed different approaches to the subject of adaptation suggesting different views of inheritance to make a historical connection between the successive generations. What they could not see then was that adaptation is necessarily a constant relation of operational coherence between the organism and its niche in the continuous realization of its living, and that both organism and niche spontaneously change together congruently.

After writing this little book, I turned my reflections to see the implications of the understanding of what we say in it, but I was not fully clear about how to connect love with our present manner of living. I thought that love was the most fundamental emotion in all aspects of our life, but I did not know how to reveal how love operated in our daily living until in the course of a conversation, my colleague Ximena Dávila Yáñez said to me the following: “Humberto, I have made a discovery, I have realized that the pain or suffering for which a person asks for help in the relational domain is always of cultural origin, and I have also realized that such pain arises as an experience of negation of love that the person that lives it accepts somehow as something that is culturally legitimate”. And she added: “Furthermore, the person that consults me also tells me without being aware that he or she is doing so, where in the relational-operational matrix of her living occurred the negation of love as well as the path to come out of the self-devaluation that he or she is conserving in all aspects of her daily living since then”.

When I asked Ximena what she did when the consulting person asked her for relational help, as I listened to her I realized through her answer that she did what I had not been able to do. I used to say that love was the first medicine, and when I was asked, how does love operate, and what to do to love? I answered saying, “just love, it is easy, love operates in the act of loving”, but nobody seemed to be able see the act of loving or how the act of loving was done. Ximena Dávila, however, with her answer was showing to me that she knew what to do as she put into action her understanding of the interplay of the biology of cognition and the biology of love in a reflective conversation with the result that the persons who consulted her recovered self-love and self-respect, and felt liberated of their pain and suffering. Later she developed the notion of cultural-biology to refer to the intrinsic biological-cultural nature of humanness that she was showing in her work of reflexive conversations with the persons that consulted her, and which we now call the biological-cultural matrix of human existence.

The different worlds that we human beings generate in our biological-cultural existence occur as different networks of conversations in the form of different networks of coordinations of coordinations of doings and emotioning in the realization of our living. Furthermore, these networks of conversations happen as different dynamics of the molecular architecture of the organism-niche relation that is the realization of the living of any organism which adopt in us the particular form of the organism-niche relation of our living in the biological-cultural matrix of our human existence.

The notion of cultural-biology proposed by Ximena brings forth a vision of the dynamic architecture of the biological-cultural nature of humanness that usually remains beyond our understanding hidden in the semantic notions that we use to talk about the different realities that we generate in our living. In other words, what the understanding of the biological-cultural nature of our humanness brings to us, and specially has given to me, is a more expanded fundamental vision of the different realities that we human beings may live. In particular, it has shown to me the nature of our emotional daily living and of the biological-cultural fundaments of our always present intimate desire for a daily living in which we realize and conserve honesty and, therefore, ethics.

Living beings occur as dynamic molecular entities that operate as totalities in a relational space, and they are realized as different kinds of organisms through the conservation of different organism-niche relations as different manners of living. Thus, we human beings exist in the conservation of an organism-niche relation which as a manner of living occurs in a relational space transcending the molecular dynamics that make it possible. And we human beings do so in the unity of body and mind through the integration of our emotions and our doings as we live our existence of loving languaging relational-reflective beings, conscious of the nature of our humanness in the deep desire of an ethical coexistence.

In the course of our conversations we decided to create a place where we would do research in the domain of humanness, and we created the Matriztic Institute in the year 2000 as a place to work and do research in the domain of the art and science of constitutive ontological thinking and doing. Now the Matriztic Institute is the place where I do all my work while following this path.

Finally, I would like to thank Dr. Pille Bunnell for the interest and appreciation that she showed for the contents of this little book when I presented it to her after my unsuccessful attempts to publish it some time in the years 1994 to 1996. And I wish to thank her for the interesting conversations that we had about the book, for her care in editing this work, and for her suggestion that I could use the expression amans in the denomination of our lineage to emphasize what I said as I claimed that love was the fundamental emotion that made possible the arising of languaging in the ancestral family.

Humberto Maturana Romesín

Instituto Matríztico

www.matriztica.org

July, 2008