I remember my high school bio teacher telling us that our body maintains homeostasis through a feedback loop like a house furnace maintains temperature. The furnace kicks on whenever it is needed to heat the house back up to the desired temperature and then shuts off again when that temperature is reached. But wouldn’t it be more efficient to just stay on at a low level always maintaining that temperature? Sort of how a car would maintain its speed. Cruise control works by maintaining the desired speed. Not speeding back up to that speed once it slows to a different speed. Right?
In: Biology
Homeostasis is the process of keeping a parameter at an optimum in the face of external agents and stochastic fluctuations that deviate it. There are countless variables governing even the simplest biological parameters, those are internal like changes in metabolism in different organs or stochastic secretions of hormones and so on and external like fluctuations in ambient temperature or stressors that activate the sympathetic nervous system. You can’t avoid these deviations, but you can rectify them. Negative feedback is a very stable approach to do this, and there are many types of it, not to mention other kinds of feedback. And regarding your example of cruise control, you have to think about it a little deeper, there is still negative feedback there, but many mathematical parameters are optimized to minimize delay and also minimize sudden changes by having small step changes, so you think you’re set on one speed, but you’re actually continuously hovering, jumping over and going under by a small amount, with feedback governing this rectification.
Source; I’m a physiologist
Edit: English
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