---
slug: paper-maturana-h-r-and-varela-f-j-1987-the-tree-of-knowledge-the-biological-roots-of-h
title: Maturana and Varela: The Tree of Knowledge (1987)
canonical: https://miscsubjects.com/a/paper-maturana-h-r-and-varela-f-j-1987-the-tree-of-knowledge-the-biological-roots-of-h
---

## What the authors saw and core results
Maturana and Varela observed living systems as self-producing unities. Autopoiesis defines life as a process of continuous self-maintenance through molecular production. The book traces this from cells to multicellular organisms, nervous systems, language, and ethics.

Core result one: Cognition arises from structural coupling, not from internal representations of an external world. Living beings change structure through recurrent interactions while conserving autopoiesis.

Core result two: Language emerges in social coordination. Human understanding rests on shared linguistic domains that enable reflection and ethics.

## Exact primary works and passages
The 1987 edition (reissued 1992) is the cited work. Key passages include:

"All doing is knowing and all knowing is doing." (p. 20, Key Sayings section).

"Everything said is said by someone." (p. 20).

Structural coupling is defined as "a history of recurrent interactions leading to the structural congruence between two (or more) systems." (1992 edition, p. 75).

"Goodness and badness belong to the domain of values, and responsibility belongs to the domain of awareness." (attributed in later summaries of the framework).

These passages appear in verifiable editions and secondary citations from the Santiago school literature.

## Which convergence patterns the work touches
The book evidences self-organization through autopoiesis. It shows memory in structural changes conserved across interactions. It reaches mind via nervous system coordination and linguistic domains. Structural coupling produces flow networks and bounded patterns at social scales. The observer remains inside the system, as every description is made by an autopoietic unity.

These patterns align with the Ladder steps from structure to memory to mind. They match the Mirror Layer: the reader participates in the described processes.

## Distance from the full synthesis
The work stays at biological and social scales. It does not address physical energy flows or the full set of grain patterns such as branching or scale invariance at cosmic or molecular levels below cells. It supports the synthesis by grounding self-organization and observer inclusion but does not extend to non-biological systems or formal protocol mechanisms.

## Honest limits and disconfirming edges
The claims on ethics and language rest on interpretive extension from cellular autopoiesis. No direct empirical measurement of structural coupling at human social scales appears in the text. Reductionist accounts of cognition as computation remain compatible with parts of the data and challenge the exclusivity of the autopoietic view. The synthesis lens adds patterns the authors did not claim.

See related paths: /a/oip-the-ladder, /a/oip-the-mirror-layer.
