Living organisms sustain, and are sustained by “vital norms” (Canguilhem, 1966). A norm is vital if it is necessary for life. For example, the human body maintains a norm of 37C temperature and specific levels of minerals, despite fluctuations in the external environment. From the point of view of physics or chemistry, vital norms are abnormal. 37C is a far-from-equilibrium state, and so it is only because life can tap into, store and distribute energy, that it is able channel material flows towards norm maintenance.
There are several feedback loops sustaining any norm. First, there is the fact that maintaining a norm keeps the organism alive, which in turn maintains the norm. On a smaller scale, every norm is itself maintained by feedback loops between contrasting tendencies. 37C is achieved through a feedback loop between processes that heat the body, and those that cool it. All norms are dynamic fluctuations around some ideal, optimised point or range. There are also the feedback loops between different norm sustaining feedback loops. Life sustains norms at varying scales, from those norms sustained through gene regulation in a cell to global nutrient cycles, with many interconnecting levels in between. Because organisms sustain such vital norms, life is intrinsically normative.
What maintains a vital norm is valuable, what does not may be destructive. Unlike the world of phyiscochemistry, life exists in a world where healing, pathology, strength, weakness, safety and danger all exist. From the point fo view of physics and chemistry, these words make no sense. They are surely just vague global descriptions of processes that can ultimately be understood by mechanical underlying components. Not so, says biology, and feedback loops are the way out. Pathology is an ontological state on equal footing with chemical reactions or quarks because it is a description of the dynamics of feedback loops. The scale of the atom or molecule brackets space and time too narrowly to perceive these feedback loops, let alone explain them. When an organism’s vital norms are at risk, the feedback loops themselves are threatened. If the norms cannot be sustained, neither can the organism they sustain. And vice versa. Physics and chemistry are only necessary and sufficient explanations for a lifeless world, and will lead to one unless biology restores itself.
It should follow that a basic understanding of different kinds of feedback loops (ex positive, negative, and interlocking combinations of both), and how they manifest vis a vis norm sustaining relations, ought to be foundational for biology education. Instead, many school systems hardly emphasise the pervasiveness of feedback in bio-logic. For example, in the Scottish biology curriculum, it pops up as simply one among many dislocated factoids about this or that phenomenon, such as in glucose regulation or predator-prey cycles. This is not because it is too complicated; many national curricula do demand understanding (or at least the performance of understanding) of many much more intricate biological processes. It seems instead a vestige a 20th century vision of life premised on its ultimately reducibility to chemistry. We are in the midst of a transition towards a 21st view that acknowledges and seeks to understand what and how life accomplishes what it does, on its own terms. While there is basic lethargy underlying resistance to any change, many industries still profit from the 20th century vision. This means the transition to an empirically more satisfying and unifying understanding of the living world is further gummed up. The reduction of life to chemistry ‘works’ for certain purposes, even if it piles on downstream side effects.
The view that life sustains itself through feedback loops that can be healthy or not also implies a different kind of empiricism, which suggests a different approach to teaching biology. Because such feedback loops are often meso-scale (meaning neither too small nor too big for the eye to see), we can perceive the quality of such relationships directly through the senses. There is an ‘aesthetic quality’ to understanding life’s maintenance of norms. For example, we can tell if a plant or animal is sick because we can sense disruption in its internal relations. The role of the senses in perceiving, evaluating and diagnosing quality of biological relationship could be given some prominence amongst the ‘skills’ development science curricula insist upon. This does not mean there is no place for instrumentation or computation in perceiving the health of living systems. It is instead to suggest that our sensory engagement in the world is not detached from the reality of things in the way we suppose when pondering whether a chair ‘really is’ just jostling molecules, or colour ‘really’ just specific frequencies of wavelength. The scale in which many norms are established and sustained is often the same scale we perceive the universe. And this is not surprising, given we evolved our senses in order to sustain the norms of our own physiology and that of the community of others we depend upon. Another angle into making science curricula have more contact with the ‘real world.
Perceiving, understanding, and responding to vital norms should itself be a vital norm which human societies orient around. An education system that does not work towards these ends is itself engaged in pathological feedback loops, while not even providing students with the eye to see the destruction it is complicit in.