Autonomy: What is it?

This Special Issue of BioSystems is devoted to clarifying the concept, and to showing how it’s being used in various examples of empirical research. Given the obscurity that still attends the concept, however, we shouldn’t expect to find that all the ’clarifications’ are equivalent--or even mutually consistent. Similarly, we shouldn’t expect to find that the notion is applied identically in all the research that’s reported here. So this preliminary sketch of the conceptual landscape may be helpful.