Dynamic Balance : Newcombe

Run and rise is tied in with the nature of the feedbacks operating in a system. On the plateaus, most cycles have negative feedback, which maintains homeostasis. In the animal organism, negative feedback preserves constant levels of temperature, sugar levels in the blood, levels of sodium and potassium ions in nerve cells. In the Earth’s ecology, negative feedbacks maintain the water cycle, the carbon cycle, the nitrogen cycle. On the rises, positive feedbacks (escalations, accelerations, explosions) appear, which disturb homeostasis and tend to flip the system to a different state, which they may succeed in doing if enough of them point in the same direction.

While homeostasis is basic to life, rapid change is basic to evolution, and therefore negative and positive feedbacks are both necessary. Negative feedbacks necessarily predominate, even in the stormy rises, otherwise the system would be torn to pieces; a certain degree of stability is essential.

Translating this into socio-political terms, we have largely conservatism (maintaining traditions inherited from our ancestors through the mechanisms of cultural evolution), but a small element of radicalism, which is also necessary to provide the flexibility for adapting to environmental changes; the radicals provide a reserve of diversity which may become relevant in a changed environment, even if irrelevant now. A totally adapted stable conservative system could not survive environmental change. A totally radical system would blow itself to bits !hrough explosions, called “revolutions”.

Life always thrives in a mid-region between freezing and boiling, between inactivity and hyper-activity, between apathy and enthusiasm, between solid and gas. (See essay “The Goldilocks Effect” in Section VIII.) But it runs along a jagged line in this zone, with the rises pointing toward hyper-activity and the runs toward placidity. Life is precariously balanced between these extremes. It may weave along the road, but must not land in the ditches on each side. episodes of Pangea occurred in Pre-Cambrian times when only unicells existed, in fact mainly Prokaryotes, and these are not well preserved in fossils.