Where Homeostasis Comes From And Where It Should Go

This is a philosopher’s, rather than a historian’s, tour of the idea of homeostasis, starting with its origins in physiology (1925). It proceeds through the glory days of cybernetics, Norbert Wiener (1948) and W. Ross Ashby’s “homeostat” (1948). Then to the core of the talk, poultry breeding. I mean the brief flourishing of I. M. Lerner’s “genetic homeostasis” (1950, 1954), motivated by his observations about return to former equilibrium after high selection pressure. Richard Lewontin (1957) critically developed the idea for adaptive stability in new environments (1957). These are the most forthright applications of homeostasis to biological species. They should serve as an ideal logical model, at which all uses of homeostasis in explaining the species should aim. By an ideal, I mean that they have the right structure to serve as explanations, even if the details were soon to be abandoned.

This ideal will be maintained in the second part of the talk, which is a mere corollary to the first.

The philosopher Richard Boyd (1989), completely unaware of the idea of genetic homeostasis, proposed “homeostatic property cluster kinds” as a type of natural kind. His intention was metaphysical, to show that certain epistemological and moral concepts are homeostatic in nature, and “therefore” grounded in natural kinds. He then used the species as an example of a homeostatic classification. Boyd deemed species to be natural kinds; they are sets whose members are organisms with properties that cluster together in equilibrium. These sets have no essential property. The Ghiselin/Hull picture of species as individuals (and “therefore” neither sets nor natural kinds), was plain wrong. Another philosopher, Paul Griffiths (1997), said that picture was plain right. Species are natural kinds, but they are historical lineages, not sets. Their essence (in a metaphysical and supposedly post-Kripkean sense) is their ancestry. Boyd’s use of homeostasis is also to be employed: “the causal homeostatic mechanism [of a species] is descent.” Griffiths refers to this, all too aptly in my ironic opinion, as squaring the circle (2000). Some systematic biologists are now (2009) referring to, and making use of, some mix of the immiscible Boyd and Griffiths.

The talk concludes by applying the rigorous 1950s ideal of Lerner and Lewontin to the present state of play.