Humberto Maturana Romesín (September 14, 1928 – May 6, 2021) was a Chilean biologist and philosopher. 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.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. (hardback), (paper) 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.Magnus Ramage, Karen Shipp (2012) Systems Thinkers 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.
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.
Early life Maturana was born in Santiago, Chile. 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.
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.
After completing secondary school at the Liceo Manuel de Salas in 1947, he enrolled at the University of Chile, studying first medicine in Santiago, then biology in London and Cambridge, Mass. Although he did not complete his medical degree, he was a teaching assistant in the biology course taught by Professor Gabriel Gasic.
Career Anatomy and physiology 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. Maturana wrote that he was an "invisible" student never officially accepted in University College, London. Nonetheless, he did research and produced a paper 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. 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. 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 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. 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" 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. 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. 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 and with Lettvin and Wall, one of the first electrophysiological studies in octopus. After a 2 year post-doctoral period at MIT, he returned to Chile in 1960.
University of Chile 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. 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. 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.
Later career In 1994, he received Chile's National Prize for Natural Sciences, 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.
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. 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. In 2020, he was awarded an honorary fellowship by the Cybernetics Society.
Politics 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.
Work
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.
Autopoiesis and the biology of cognition