Evolution	Organisms are products of evolution. A degree of similarity in functions and mechanisms is to be expected, either through conservation within lineages or convergence in distant phyla by virtue of meeting similar ecological challenges.
Thermodynamic openness	Organisms maintain themselves far from thermodynamic equilibrium by importing ‘order’ from their surroundings in the form of matter and energy, chemically transforming it to do work and exporting ‘disorder’ in the form of waste products of various sorts.
Future orientation	In addition to being thermodynamically open, biological systems are structures that actively dissipate entropy through the production of order. Although past events affect their adaptive behaviour, organisms are intrinsically oriented towards what happens next.
Interaction	Organisms must establish causal relations with features of their surroundings that lead to exchanges of matter and energy, which are essential to the organism's persistence in the first instance.
Autopoiesis	Organisms are continually being produced by a network of components, which are themselves being continually produced by networks of components. Simultaneously, the organism as a whole (including its constituents) is interacting with a surrounding medium.
Homeostasis/allostasis	Organisms are constituted by a wide variety of control and regulatory mechanisms, including multiple kinds of feedback mechanism, which maintain the stability of the system and buffer it against the effects of more or less constant internal change.
Functional norms	Homeostatic and allostatic processes operate within a range of values outside of which the organism's persistence, wellbeing or ability to reproduce are threatened.
Functional linkage	Functions critical to an organism's persistence, wellbeing or reproduction are linked, directly or indirectly, strongly or weakly (e.g. affect and metabolism).
Adaptive behaviour	To persist, grow, thrive or reproduce, an organism must continually adapt to its surrounding medium by altering its internal structure and/or its interactive relation to features of that medium.
Information-dependence	Adaptive behaviour is dependent upon information. A state of affairs that stimulates an organism to adaptive behaviour (i.e. alteration of its internal structure and/or its interactive relation to environmental features) conveys information for that organism.
Selectivity	An organism is capable of interacting profitably with some, but not all, features of its environment as a result of its evolutionary and individual interactive history. Not every state of affairs is information for that organism.
Operational closure	Organisms are operationally closed as well as open to flows of matter and energy; the activities that produce and maintain an organism take place within a semi-permeable boundary, which is the basis of its autonomy.