A systems view of biological health

Section 2: Theory

Licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 : also see my full Copyright statement.
HELP REQUIRED! This website/book has (for technical issues) been written using a plain ASCII text editor, and so contains quite a few typo's. If you find any and have a couple of minutes you can report them via my special (anonymous) typo reporting contact form

"Form Follows Function, Function Follows Form" (or "6F") – the whole of your organic and psychological being is a great big feedback loop. Organisms completely fit into their environment, and this fitting in occurs simultaneously and continuously in multiple ways:

• we adapt our form so as to to better function
• we adapt our function to optimise (best use all possibilities of) our form
• ...which includes behavioural as well as metabolic adaptation
• we may move to a location we are better suited to
• ... or we may (as all living organisms do - even the most primitive of microbes) may adapt our environment to better suit our form and function. This adaptation may be very local on our boundary/interface, or more widespread. Forests manipulate continental weather patterns, vast numbers of coral polyps alter coastal environments (etc).

There are two main overlapping and interacting aspects to any healthy organism – described by the aphorism :"Form Follows Function, Function Follows Form". A few examples :

1. your brain structure determines how you can use your nervous system and think (etc.) - but your brain structure - and the structure of the peripheral autonomic nervous system - changes (on a timescale of months and years) according to how you think, feel, move and use your senses
2. the liver replaces and re-builds cells over a timescale of hours so that it is best adapted to break down the food you are eating
3. with usage your musculoskeletal system will adapt to become as strong as necessary to match however you load it[1]. The bones adapt within hours to loading exceeding their normal capacity, but the total timescale of change is one of weeks and months to years.
4. the gut microbiome constantly re-models its own ecosystem on a timescale of hours to weeks according to both the food consumed and the metabolic-emotional milieu that it lives inside.

This mutual constantly self-regulating and self-adjusting feedback between physical anatomy and process determines evolution, embryological development, and every conceivable area of your life. The whole of your organic and psychological being is a great big feedback loop. If you wake up one day and realise that form and function is not the best it could be, the only way to effect change is to reinforce or inhibit systemic feedback loops acording to the rules they operate by. The thing is to retain (and cultivate) a real active trust in the underlying self-regulatory self-optimising intelligence.

"Form Follows Function, Function Follows Form" generated every living creature and plant on this beautiful and exuberant world, and that feedback loop is not some biblical tablet of stone. It responds with unimaginable creativity to the lightest of touches, provided that those feathers and butterflies wings are organised and directed according to the "rules" that made you. Those rules are (unfortunately) not well represented by the ones we have adopted in our culture, so health (and ill-health), personality, character, mental resilience (and instability) have the outward (culturally normative and false) appearance of being intransigent and fixed – and often dis-eased or dysfunctional.

The three body types

This 6F relationship is visible all around you in the various body shapes that humans grow into. The way that you use your senses – which ones you refer to use, how you use them, which ones you least prefer – alters the way that you use your body (move) and the way that you orient to both your inner self and to the external world – which in turn changes the "form" taken up by the physical body. For various reasons (see "Three-Compartment Body Plan", later) there are three fundamental kinds of sensory preference:

1. People who are more muscle-aware (mesomorphs[2]) use their muscles more, and wriggle around in the womb more than "average" before they are even born, thus growing into a fairly square and solid muscular body.
2. "Ectomorphs"are more interested in external senses, and so tend to be tall and thin because their attention is – relatively speaking - hardly on the physical body at all.
3. The third group (endomorphs[3]) are very aware of their internal physical visceral body as an emotive and sensory landscape, and so tend to be slightly more pear-shaped adults.

All three types will swear on their mothers grave that they use all their senses. But each has the tendency to settle attentin on its dominant trait - and so there are many different combination of sensory engagement that result in radically different kinds of life-experience and capacity to understand or empathise with people who do not share the same sensory preferences. It should be understood that this preference is both relative and marginal, and it’s usually more like a 36-32-32% split (perhaps at most 45-35-20%) – something hard to pin down given the limitations of English to describe internal and sensory experiences.

Of the three generic types, the mesomorphs are more able to carry on even if overwhelmed because they are relatively more aware of their physical strength and presence. In contrast, endomorphs are generally speaking more affected by emotional overwhelm but are also usually more able to find supportive company. And ectomorphs find it relatively easy to be unaware of internal turmoil but far less easy to switch off from external stressors, because they are more likely to have lots of sensory aerials checking out the external world.

Of course these generalisations are cardboard caricatures because everyone is a combination of all three in differing proportions and the differences in reality are quite subtle. Each innate sensory style carries its own strengths and weaknesses, and most importantly, is not a "life sentence", because the human sensory system and form is so malleable, the "function" so responsive to small shifts in how it is used, and the entire body-mind so intrinsically open to different usage. everyone is necessarily a subtle blend of these three biological tendencies - because we cannot physically exist if one of them is missing or unduly inaccessible

Language as a systematic bias

The self referential feedback loop inherent in 6F is inherent in every aspect of Life, including the supposedly “higher” funCtions such as Language. There is much debate in Linguistics, the dominant school at present (q.v. Noam Chomsky) proposing that grammar and meaning are “natural” and therefore universal. Benjamin Lee Whorf on the other hand considered that the language of Native Americans allowed them to experience the world very differently from people speaking Latin/European languages.

My feeling is that the truth lies more firmly with Whorf, but Chomsky also has a point [7] - because it does not begin with language. Languages form as a result of how people think of and make meaning of the world - and then the language reinforces that form of meaning-making, in a feedback loop that has taken Europeans (and European language speakers) further and further from our hunter-gatherer ancestry and more and more towards a technological meta-existence. Eastern and Northern European languages retain a little more of a sense of human-in-and-of-nature. Perhaps one reason why the Germanic and Eastern European countries produced the Phenomenalist schools of philosophy and scientists interested in participation in (rathe than domination of) Nature - such as Nikola Tesla (Serbia), Viktor Schauberger (Austria), Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Germany), Emanuel Swedenborg (Sweden) and Jakob Johann von Uexküll (Estonia).

Form-Function-Feedback

The impression given by popular descriptions of evolution is a final form, that carries little information as to function. But it is the function that has demanded the form, and honed it to something that is perfect – given all the other compromises that have to be reached within that process. The animal will constantly adapt its behaviour to get the very most out of the form that it has. So Darwin’s Galapagos Island finches may have evolved their beaks to suit different holes insects can hide in – but each finch will also "know" its own beak [4] and optimise what they have to how the environment demands it is used. Thus, higher-level adaptation (i.e. above the level of physiology and homeostasis) comes as both hard evolved adaptations (the Form), and soft behavioural (Functional) adaptations. Some forms - such as that of sharks - are so well adapted and optimised to specific environments that they have persisted for 450 million years. Bumblebees have retained the almost impossibly efficient wing shape and flying mode for some 37 milion years - their flying perfectly adapted to their lifestyle, their lifestyle perfectly adapted to their anatomy, and both perfectly adapted to the flower-filled environment they live in. Flowers have likewise adapted to bumblebees, producing more nectar when they detect the characteristic buzz of the bees wings. In contrast, humans have become more vulnerable in all environments by anatomically de-adapting (giving up many of the specifics that e.g. place bumblebess and sharks into such specific ecological niches), which has then, uniquely, allowed us to adapt to any environment.

Perhaps easy to forget is the continuity of body and environment, such that ALL living systems adapt the environment to best suit function and form. The landscape and biosphere we see today is the result of millions of years of adaptations. Humans are possibly the greatest adapters of all time, but worms and beetles, ants, trees, beavers, wolves, corals all adapt the environment in ways that affect anything from a few square metres to hundreds of square miles or even on a continental or global scale. The The Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) around 2.4 to 2.3 billion years ago was created my microscopic oceanic organism that cumulatively shifted the oxygen content of the earth's atmosphere from almost zero to over 20% and made multicellular organisms possible.

Morphic resonance [9]

The principle of Form has a morphic identity that passes on generationally, through which individual cells know their task and place within this complex differentiated multicellular colony. It is a sort of identity that operates across biological, psychological, social and spiritual spaces. Sheldrake’s morphic resonance [5] might be considered to be a part of it, but it also relates to the sense of self-identity (including that expressed by the immune system), to “simple” genetics and to the way our organic self peers back into the past and somewhat into the future to organise its Form.

Chickens and eggs

So is there a chicken or an egg? Does function come first or form? The answer is (of course) that it's a two-way street. The cultural emphasis on anatomy gives a bias towards thinking of form as being primary - such as the idea that we can't think without a brain. This can be proven by removing or cutting or disabling any part of the body and seeing the immediate effect. However, destructive testing is a very blunt instrument to use when inspecting a multi-dimensional complex life-form that is Not One, Not Two. Do all functions and communications have to rely on anatomy or direct (intentional / explicit) communication? Well -our real lived world says otherwise. If I am in a strange town at night and am looking for somewhere to eat, there are lots of options. I can literally smell the air to detect cooking, I can look for discarded food wrappers, or see other people walking round with a bag of chips, I can ask people, I can use my sense of how towns are usually organised to guess which direction might be the best. None of these are hard-wired forms of information, but are explicit and implicit signs - communications that are outside the need for some direct communication system. I can also use a search engine - which is a direct link to a form of memory. My experience is not always good with these - I once walked about 5 miles between various businesses listed on the internet as providing photocopy services - to find that every one had stopped trading, sometimes 3 or 4 years ago. Of course, photocopy services do not have the same signs that food does. But on the other hand, food is a Life requirement, whereas photocopying is not.

So the body makes the anatomy that it requires as it grows into itself [8]. Some of that anatomy is hard-wired through ancestral (genetic) memory as being useful. But exactly HOW each living organism uses the anatomy it is provided with depened on the requirement for adaptation to the real world. And that adaptation in turn develops both more obvious details of the physical anatomy and its interconnection, it's details function and how it is applied to meet that adaptive demand. Relational and symbiotic behaviours are so important biologically because they massively expand the possible choice of adaptations for a given form, as its function becomes part of a larger meta-organism.