Homeostats and cybernetic regulation
One of the very few things I remember from school is a visit to the local trading standards people. I can remember two stories. A mouse was baked into something sold in Marks and Spencer, and M&S would not allow the story to be linked to them, letting the baker take all the flak. The other was about farmers who had watered down their milk, saying things like “the cows have been eating wet grass”.
Now when you think about it, the fact that all milk from all cows is similar enough in its composition, and constant enough over time, to allow trading standards to prosecute cheating farmers is truly remarkable. It means that there are few if any factors in the farming environment that can distort the milk a cow makes for its calf. That is a good model for a homeostat: something that keeps things pretty much constant, no matter what.
As a slightly edgier, more policy-oriented example, take John Adams and his work on accidents at road junctions. If there is an accident blackspot and you put in extra warning signs and a high-friction road surface what happens? The accidents happen at the next junction down. Thinking that they’ll just stop altogether is like the people who want to believe that wearing a face mask is counter-productive because they think that people will feel safer in public and relax the two-metre rule. The experimental reality is that masks enhance people’s awareness of the importance of social distance. (Further experimental reality, of course, is that the benefit of masks is itself non-linear, so if you and I are both mask-wearing, infection rates plummet more than you might think.)
Many, many systems — natural systems, social systems, political systems, technical systems — exhibit homeostatic behaviour. If you have a model of linear intervention, like the road engineer making a junction safer, you will more often than not be disappointed. Many moons ago, talking to the then supply chain director at Tesco about taking costs out of the supply chain as a whole, he reported that time after time, they found that all they had done was move costs elsewhere.
The cultural overlay
People in authority don’t like this line of reasoning because we are looking at properties of the system, not at individual behaviour and accountability. And despite the fact that the human body has very many beautifully intricate homeostats, doctors don’t like it either. For the same reason, linear interventions tend to be fatuous.
The most obvious homeostat is body temperature control. Not only is everyone’s body temperature pretty much the same, but the body takes great pains to maintain that temperature over time, especially in our core, even at the expense of shutting down peripheral circulation altogether. And if our temperature does go up, it is part of an infection fighting strategy.
But the homeostat that we refuse to credit is body mass. The body regulates our weight and the distribution of that weight between muscle mass, bone mass, fat stores and the nervous system. We desperately want to believe (against all the evidence) that if we eat less and exercise more, we will be thinner. Wrong thought process, guaranteed to fail, almost universally believed.
The body mass homeostat is at the intersection of some amazingly complex systems. The various biomes, especially the gut biome, which of course is not even composed of human cells. The endocrine (hormonal) system which signals to all the organs of the body how they should respond to situations as they unfold. The psychological system through which we construct our current reality and social reality. And may more.
When we have a temperature, we know we are ill. When we manage to disrupt our body mass homeostat, so that for instance we put on weight, we should know that we are ill, but we do not. It is so much the social norm, and so politically disrupted that we do not in practice think we are ill.
When we are addicted to psychoactive substances, we have disrupted some balancing mechanism somewhere. That is sort of the point: that the substance offers a short-cut of sort that we take again and again despite all the evidence that the medium-term outcomes are bad. The most common and obvious substance that disrupts our body mass homeostat is sugar. Sugar goes straight to our pleasure centre, and in doing so it bypasses our appetite control mechanisms. Easy enough to test that out: try eating the same “calories” as steak or cake. Which one leaves you wanting more? Oh, and refined carbohydrate like a savoury snack food is every bit as bad/effective.
Big food knows that a sugar hit from a mouthful of product sells more product. The fact that the glucose spikes are both directly harmful and indirectly addictive is just part of where they live. They rely on that addiction for their profits. Big food MUST bypass our body mass homeostat in order to sell their products, so they do. But you will not find nutrition researchers investigating that bypassing of the homeostat: they want to show that sugar is or is not bad for you, which is a different matter. This is far too political to be properly researched. Nobody wants you to simply self-regulate! The world economy is at stake.
Why might our bodies do this? As an analogy think of a grizzly bear feasting on autumn berries. The bear is putting on fat for a winter hibernation and needs to bypass his normal appetite control. Sugar in the berries works for him in context.
Soil as homeostat
A living soil provides the nutrients needed by the plants growing in it. In the last blog we described this the other way around: plants are algae that have learned to farm fungi. That is typical of a real homeostat: depending what part of the mechanism we approach, we describe the way it works in a different but complementary manner. Soil will both marshal the nutrients that are needed and filter out minerals that are toxic. How amazingly sensitive and complex is that?
Equally the soil needs to have a range of plants growing in it to support its function. This is a living organism that needs feeding: its food comes from actively growing plant roots and from decaying plant matter. We need plants that have deep roots that can help break up the subsoil. We need nitrogen fixing roots and their symbiotic bacteria. We need more different soil microorganisms than I will ever know even the phyla of, all interacting with plants in different ways.
Just as you can get some initial weight-loss by going on a magazine diet, you can get some initial fertility by ploughing the soil. But you are disrupting the mechanism that allows the soil to do its work for you. You are getting short-term gain and medium-term dysregulation and dysfunction.
Just as you can take some dietary supplements and get some initial feeling of improved health, you can put fertiliser on soil and get some greening and rapid growth. In doing so, you have damaged the homeostat in a way you have no idea how to repair or redress.
We have planted a lot of trees on our smallholding here. Fruit and nut trees that we care a lot about, and native trees to see where they will take. One of the problems with grazing sheep is that they are effective at eating tree seedlings so that there are no young trees. When we planted the bare root trees we added to the hole, as a precaution, some volcanic rock dust, some rock phosphate and some seaweed meal. None of that material is directly accessible to the tree roots as they regrow.
We needed the homeostat to work for the trees. We added no easily accessible fertilisers, so that the trees would have to build their partnership with the fungi and other micro-organisms that will support their ongoing growth. We don’t want the appearance of health that needs to be maintained with inputs, we want trees that can provision themselves.[1]
What I have observed is a bit of a step function, from trees being alive and functioning with new leaves and fruit, to trees that are positively thriving. It happens quite suddenly. The change is from plant lethargy to plants repairing themselves and looking vibrant.
If you want to focus on one small part of this system, consider the phosphates. Phosphates are necessary to plants. All fertilisers have phosphate in them, and it is highly soluble. If you make soluble phosphate available, it will be taken up directly by plant roots. By making sure there in insoluble phosphate available we are ensuring that the plant provisioning networks in the soil are working. Fungi are able to secrete substances that dissolve the rock phosphate when it is needed. That is twenty year or longer support, not a two-month superficial response that undermines the homeostat.
The climate homeostat
Be in no doubt that the climate as we know it is actively maintained and stabilised by a myriad of living systems. It is the result of aeons of life providing a stable environment for life itself. What we humans are doing currently is testing the limits of that stabilisation.
We have repeatedly said in this blog that homeostats can be damaged or destroyed. That is the point. So, what does it take to destroy the ability of life on earth to control the climate? The language that tends to get used is one of tipping points. At a certain point of stress, the ability of particular natural systems to play their interlocking role disappears. For instance, when the tundra melts its ability to be a sink for carbon dioxide and methane disappears and the tundra becomes a runaway reinforcing factor in the warming of the climate.
I think the current estimate is that of 15 identified global tipping points; 9 have now occurred. The second important point about tipping points is that they tip: they result in sudden, irreversible changes. The existence of such tipping points both regional and global is implied by the history of civilisations destroying themselves. They clearly reach a point at which they can no longer control their destiny. Changes that they introduced as part of their civilisation, typically agricultural, come back to bite them with a vengeance.
I met a cheery 95-year-old just now in the rain. He said he had worked at Aldermaston and then on advanced physics research at Cambridge. He said he couldn’t become a professor because he was an east end orphan! What he was concerned to tell me was that, in his long experience, mankind was utterly mad and incapable of changing. He himself was creating an animal sanctuary to make some amends for the sins of his nuclear weapons past.
For US politics not to become unstable itself, which tipping point has arguably already happened, people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez need to persuade the US political system to work. AOC can look after herself: surely, she is one of the brightest, most passionate, most articulate stars in US politics. For her pains, she gets serious money put up against her to unseat her in the next election.
Mankind is certainly showing no ability to take on board the peril it is putting itself in. Not at the level of individual health, no at the level of landscape function and the life of the soil, not at the level of climate change and how climate is controlled. There are great minds and pioneering lives who finds ways forward, but in the end, no-one wants to know, and corporate greed wipes out the best initiatives. The minimum we can do is to understand how the key homeostats function and how to avoid preventing them working.
[1] As it turned out, after an impossibly wet planting season we had an impossibly dry spell when we did resort to giving the trees some water to make sure they didn’t dry out, and to make sure the soil microorganisms were not set back by the heat. Some trees were also challenged by marauding escaped sheep who thought that the new leaves were just the best thing going.
