Saturday, March 10, 2007

Homeostasis

Homeostasis, the maintenance of the status quo, is an important aspect of all biological processes. Evolution deals with a long time scale, so that it appears as if everything is possible, supposedly depending on the random mutations and natural selections. Development of an organism, on the other hand, happens in a much shorter time scale. When a fertilized egg develops into a multi-cellular life-form, there is not much new information being generated through an interaction with the environment. So that we need to consider the multi-cellular development as an instance of homeostasis.

The concept of homeostasis is accompanied by (some) invariant parameters. Development on the surface appears to be a generation of new order de nuvo, but in actuality it must be sustained by the invariance of some structural properties, turning the implicates into the explicits. Learning, accompanied and resulting in personality changes, can too be regarded as an instance of this generalized concept of homeostasis.