CHAPTER II 
DISPENSABILITY OF TELEONOMY  

Teleology and teleonomy are notions employed in discourse, descriptive and 
explanatory, about living systems, and although it is claimed that they do not 
necessarily enter as causal elements in their functioning, it is asserted that 
they are essential definitory features of their organization. Our present aim 
is to show that in the light of the preceding discussion, these notions are 
unnecessary for the understanding of the living organization. 
 
l. PURPOSELESSNESS 

It is usually maintained that the most remarkable feature of living systems is 
a purposeful organization, or what is the same, the possession of an internal 
project or program represented and realized in and through their structural 
organization. Thus, ontogeny is generally considered as an integrated process 
of development towards an adult state, through which certain structures are 
attained that allow the organism to perform certain functions according to 
the innate project which defines it in relation to the environment. Also, 
phylogeny is viewed as the history of adaptive transformations through 
reproductive processes aimed at satisfying the project of the species, with 
complete subordination of the individual to this end. Furthermore, it is 
apparent that there are organisms that may even appear capable of specifying 
some purpose in advance (as the authors of this book) and conduct all their 
activities towards this attainment (heteropoiesis). This element of apparent 
purpose or the possession of a project or program in the organization of living 
systems, which has been called teleonomy without implying any vitalistic 
connotations, is frequently considered as a necessary, if not as a sufficient, 
definitory feature for their characterization. Purpose or aims, however, as we 
saw in the first chapter, are not features of the organization of any machine 
(allo- or autopoietic); these notions belong to the domain of our discourse 
about our actions, that is, they belong to the domain of descriptions, and 
when applied to a machine, or any system independent from us, they reflect 
our considering the machine or system in some encompasssing context. In 
general, the observer puts the machines either conceptually or concretely to 
some use, and thus defines a set of circumstances that lead the machine to 
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change, following a certain path of variations in its output. The connection 
between these outputs, the corresponding inputs, and their relation with the 
context in which the observer includes them, determine what we call the aim 
or purpose of the machine; this aim necessarily lies in the domain of the 
observer that defines the context and establishes the nexuses. Similarly the 
notion of function arises in the description made by the observer of the 
components of a machine or system in reference to an encompassing entity, 
which may be the whole machine or part of it, and whose states constitute 
the goal that the changes in the components are to bring about. Here again, 
no matter how direct the causal connections may be between the changes of 
state of the components and the state which they originate in the total 
system, the implications in terms of design alluded to by the notion of 
function are established by the observer and belong exclusively to his domain 
of description. Accordingly, since the relations implied in the notion of 
function are not constitutive of the organization of an autopoietic system, 
they cannot be used to explain its operation. 

	The organization of a machine, be it autopoietic or allopoietic, only 
states relations between components and rules for their interactions and 
transformations, in a manner that specifies the conditions of emergence of 
the different states of the machine which, then, arise as a necessary outcome 
whenever such conditions occur. Thus, the notions of purpose and function 
have no explanatory value in the phenomenological domain which they 
pretend to illuminate, because they do not refer to processes indeed operating 
in the generation of any of its phenomena. This does not preclude their 
being adequate for the orientation of the listener towards a given domain of 
thought. Accordingly, a prediction of a future state of a machine consists 
only in the accelerated realization in the mind of an observer of its succeeding 
states, and any reference to an early state to explain a later one in functional 
or purposeful terms, is an artifice of his description, made in the perspective 
of his simultaneous mental observation of the two states, that induces in the 
mind of the listener an abbreviated realization of the machine. Therefore any 
machine, a part of one or a process that follows a predictable course, can be 
described by an observer as endowed with a project, a purpose or a function, 
if properly handled by him with respect to an encompassing context. 

	Accordingly, if living systems are physical autopoietic machines, teleonomy 
becomes only an artifice of their description which does not reveal any feature 
of their organization, but which reveals the consistency in their operation 
within the domain of observation. Living systems, as physical autopoietic 
machines, are purposeless systems. 

2. INDIVIDUALITY 
The elimination of the notion of teleonomy as a defining feature of living 
systems changes the outlook of the problem completely, and forces us to 
consider the organization of the individual as the central question for the 
understanding of the organization of living systems. 

	In fact, a living system is specified as an individual, as a unitary element of 
interactions, by its autopoietic organization which determines that any change 
in it should take place subordinated to its maintenance, and thus sets the 
boundary conditions that specify what pertains to it and what does not 
pertain to it in the concreteness of its realization. If the subordination of all 
changes in a living system to the maintenance of its autopoietic organization 
did not take place (directly or indirectly), it would lose that aspect of its 
organization which defines it as a unity, and hence it would disintegrate. Of 
course it is true for every unity, whichever way it is defined, that the loss of 
its defining organization results in its disintegration; the peculiarity of living 
systems, however, is that they disintegrate whenever their autopoietic organization is lost, not that they can disintegrate. As a consequence, all change 
must occur in each living system without interference with if(functioning as 
a unity in a history of structural change in which the autopoietic organization 
remains invariant. Thus ontogeny is both an expression of the individuality of 
living systems and the way through which this individuality is realized. As a 
process, ontogeny, then, is the expression of the becoming of a system that at 
each moment is the unity in its fullness, and does not constitute a transit 
from an incomplete (embryonic) state to a more complete or final one (adult). 

	The notion of development arises, like the notion of purpose, in the 
context of observation, and thus belongs to a different domain other than 
the domain of the autopoietic organization of the living system. Similarly, 
the conduct of an autopoietic machine that an observer can witness, is the 
reflection of the paths of changes that it undergoes in the process of main· 
taining constant its organization through the control of the variables that can 
be displaced by perturbations, and through the specification in this same 
process of the values around which these variables are maintained at any 
moment. Since the autopoietic machine has no inputs or outputs, any correlation between regularly occurring independent events that perturb it, and 
the state to state transitions that arise from these perturbations, which the 
observer may pretend to reveal, pertain to the history of the machine in 
the context of the observation, and not to the operation of its autopoietic 
organization.