Stability/Flexibility: the tightly coupled homeostasis generator is at the same time the driver of change

Abstract

There is “no Flexibility without Stability and no Stability without Flexibility”: this is a crucial feature common to any system interacting with its environment. This tight link between two apparently opposite features is at the basis of the time-honoured concept of homeostasis (the tendency of any adaptive system to go back to its “comfort zone” contrasting the incoming perturbations) and is widely recognized since long time. On the contrary, the fact that the escape from a stable attractor state is a consequence of the same homeostasis mechanisms is often overlooked. In this brief note, we will try to give a proof-of-concept of the relation existing between stability/flexibility based homeostasis and the state changes at all the levels of biological organization. The ubiquity of the same principles across very different systems is a signature of a new attitude to look at scientific enterprise from a network-based viewpoint.