Description:
Life Out of Balance: Homeostasis and Adaptation in a Darwinian World offers a fascinating intellectual history of one of biology's most influential ideas. Joel B. Hagen traces the emergence of homeostasis and its growing importance across physiology, ecology, behavior, and evolutionary science during the decades surrounding World War II. Examining the work of scientists who sought to explain how living systems maintain stability while adapting to changing environments, Hagen reveals the profound impact of homeostatic thinking on modern biology and systems science. Interdisciplinary in scope, this book illuminates the ongoing tensions between concepts of regulation, adaptation, fitness, and natural selection, providing essential insight into the scientific foundations of contemporary biological thought.
Review Quotes:
"Life Out of Balance provides a rich resource for biologists seeking to understand the diverse ways in which biologists have deployed or criticized the foundational concept of homeostasis." --Quarterly Review of Biology
"Across deserts and tundra, from kangaroo rats to human societies, Hagen masterfully charts the history of a key concept in twentieth-century biological thought: homeostasis. Life Out of Balance uncovers the intertwined fates of ideas about self-regulation in clinical medicine, genetics, cybernetics, evolutionary theory, and more."--Erika Lorraine Milam, author of Creatures of Cain: The Hunt for Human Nature in Cold War America
"What emerges from the multiple cases [Hagen presents] is how deeply the idea of homeostasis was woven into twentieth century theories in not just physiology but in ecology, genetics, and evolutionary biology. The final picture repositions well-known names in these disciplines in previously unconsidered currents and networks. In short, this is a rich and rewarding study for any historian of ecology and evolutionary biology."--Journal of the History of Biology