Autonomy and Heterarchy: Organizing Control in Biological Organisms

In order to maintain themselves as systems far from equilibrium with their environment, organisms must control the operation of numerous production mechanisms. Control involves mechanisms that make or are responsive to measurements of conditions within or in the environment of the organism and that operate on flexible constraints in other mechanisms to adjust their operation. A frequent assumption of humans is that control mechanisms are organized in a hierarchical pyramid. However, control in biological organisms commonly deviates from several principles of hierarchical organization and is better characterized as organized heterarchically. To provide a positive understanding of autonomy, this paper advances several features of its heterarchical organization and illustrates them using control of glucose regulation in mammals as an exemplar.