CONCEPT
Homeostasis
The maintenance of an organism's internal conditions within a viable range — Walter Cannon's 1932 term for the biological phenomenon that Wiener generalized into the universal principle of negative feedback.
Homeostasis is the biological signature of negative feedback. The human body maintains internal temperature within a range of roughly one degree Celsius; below, enzymes slow and cellular processes falter; above, proteins denature and neural function degrades. The hypothalamus monitors blood temperature, triggers shivering or sweating, constricts or dilates blood vessels — and the system oscillates around thirty-seven degrees, never quite achieving perfect equilibrium but maintaining conditions within the range that allows the organism to function. Walter Cannon coined the term in 1932 from the Greek homeo (similar) and stasis (standing). Wiener recognized homeostasis as the biological instance of a universal principle: every system that persists against entropic pressure requires continuous correction, and the correction is what separates living systems from the dissolution the universe tends toward.
In The You On AI Field Guide
Cannon's homeostasis extended Claude Bernard's nineteenth-century concept of the milieu intérieur — the organism's internal environment, maintained against external disturbance by continuous physiological adjustment. Bernard had understood that organisms do not passively endure