In automatic control theory “homeostasis” is defined as the property of a system in which variables are regulated so that internal conditions remain stable and relatively constant. Homeostasis is a fundamental concept in biology because is what allows the life of organisms. In fact, it maintains the stability of the organisms in response to changes in external conditions. The concept of homeostasis is tied to the strictly correlation and interdependence of all systems in a body, i.e. its functional unity. Organisms can live and survive only because are giant cybernetic hierarchical hologramatic macro-systems.
Donald Johnson defines cybernetics as:
… the interdisciplinary study of control systems with feedback. (Programming of Life, Big Mac Publishers 2010)
While Norbert Wiener, about homeostasis, writes:
In the process called homeostasis there is a large set of cases where feedback is applied to physiological phenomena and is absolutely necessary to the continuation of life. […] For our internal organization we must have a large series of automatic controls, and all a series of mechanisms that could sustain the working of a large chemical industrial plant: these are what we call homeostatic mechanisms. (Cybernetics, MIT Press 1961)
As known, basically there are two kinds of feedback: positive and negative. What kind is used in the organisms? The regulation of a single physiological process (example: blood pressure) needs the collaboration of many correlated homeostatic processes with negative feedback. Biological homeostasis necessarily involves countless processes using negative feedback loops. A negative feedback happens when the results of a change act to reduce or counteract it (negative loop gain). Conversely, a positive feedback happens when the results of a change act to increase or ease the change (positive loop gain). When in the organisms, despite all and caused by illness or injury, a positive feedback happens, this produces a risky and uncontrolled ever increasing deviance, leading to disequilibrium and eventually to death. Organisms defend themselves from changes, thanks to an all-pervading homeostatic system that cybernetically self-regulates.
Since regulation and control make sense only in the perspective of what a system must do and what values/constraints its parameters must meet, they are essentially teleological. Regulation, control and guide point to design, not at all to what is unguided as Darwinian evolution. Homeostasis requires a sensor to detect changes, an effector that is able to decrease those changes and a negative feedback loop between the two. These three things necessarily need to be correlated together by an higher direction with a goal, which only design can provide.
That said, a first question to Darwinists comes to mind: if homeostasis grants the stability of organisms, and the organisms are plenty of negative feedback systems counteracting changes, how can Darwinian evolution (= macro changes of organisms) happen in the first place?
But there is another worse question for Darwinists: given evolution wants to change organisms, why evolution created so many negative feedback systems that counteract changes? Why evolution, which is by definition macro variation, created homeostasis, which is robust maintenance of the status quo?
Darwinian evolution should prefer and create systems with positive feedback. In fact, when the loop gain is positive that creates divergence from equilibrium. And what is evolution but “divergence from equilibrium”? Given the pretension of unguided evolution is to have created 500 million extremely different species, evolution should prefer and construct what diversifies, not what maintains equal. Negative feedbacks serve to stabilize systems, not to change them. Homeostatic mechanisms give organisms a strong tendency toward stasis, not toward evolution. Homeostatic mechanisms counter evolution.
Darwin’s feedbacks should be of positive kind and instead organisms are filled with negative feedback systems. Another day, another contradiction of Darwinism. This clear Darwinian contradiction is similar to the contradiction I dealt with about the repair systems in this previous post.
We know in advance what evolutionists object to this reasoning: evolution has nothing to do with homeostatic feedback systems, because they can coexist with evolution, and evolution works at the genetic level, and evolution can create X and non X in the same time, and…
Mind you, how fixity and stability in all major workings of organisms (granted by homeostasis) could be consistent with large variability and diversification (needed by macroevolution)? Evolution “works” at the genetic level but must produce phenotypic results, and at this level we see homeostasis, i.e. stasis = non evolution.
We can add the homeostatic feedback systems to the list of contradictions of Darwinism. This list is already long but it will still lengthen, because – as I like to repeat – when a thing is false, is false from all points of view. We can patiently sit down on the river side to wait for the corpse of this absurd Darwin’s theory to finally sink under the weight of its own contradictions.