The fundamental feature that characterizes living systems is autonomy, and any account of
their organization as systems that can exist as individual unities must show what autonomy
is as a phenomenon proper to them, and how it arises in their operation as such unities.
Accordingly the following is proposed.(1) That autonomy in living systems is a feature of self-
production (autopoiesis), and that a living system is properly characterized only as a network
of processes of production of components that is continuously, and recursively, generated …

The fundamental feature that characterizes living systems is autonomy, and any account of
their organization as systems that can exist as individual unities must show what autonomy
is as a phenomenon proper to them, and how it arises in their operation as such unities.
Accordingly the following is proposed.