From geochemical to biogeochemical cycles: an organizational view of how (and why) life shaped its conditions of existence

Alvaro Moreno, Charbel N. El-HAni, Cristian Saborido

Since the seminal work of Maturana and Varela, the Organizational Approach (OA) has defended an organism-centered view of life. This paper argues that the OA must be extended to include the historical, ecological and geochemical processes that sustain biological systems across scales. We develop a multiscale account of closure of constraints (CoC) in which localized closures can emerge and persist, and — under specific ecological regimes — stabilize larger-scale networks that progressively transform abiotic geochemical cycling into biogeochemical regimes. On this view, ecological organization is not merely contextual but partly constitutive of biological autonomy: persistence and evolvability depend on how unavoidable interactions are organized into structures that regulate shared conditions. We propose criteria to distinguish closure from mere feedback coupling, and we show how higher-level closures can stabilize non-closed components and structures. This reframing turns OA into a program for explaining living individuals as necessarily embedded in, and partially constituted by, the long-term causal regimes that enable the persistence of life on the planet.