Could you provide some references to Maturana’s 1989 experimental work, reports in peer-reviewed journals of experiments and results?
Bill posted a nice, succinct assessment of Maturana’s autopoiesis ideas to CSGnet in 1992. In that post, he refers to his 1987 paper at the ASC European Conference (in St. Gallen), which is reprinted in LCS II 175-188. I didn’t find it on line right away, so I just scanned it and put it in Dropbox. I assume you have it, but if not you can download it from here. (Excuse my marginal notes from sometime in the early 1990s.)