Cast methods in biocybernetics

Abstract

The systematic use of what we now call Systems Theory in the description of biological systems, and more precisely, the nervous system, took off in the Forties although many of the basic ideas had been being managed in philosophic and scientific circles almost since the Ancient Greeks. From 1943 to 1945, a kind of synergetic process was started up, triggered as the result of three basic works. First, Norbert Wiener, Arthur Rosemblueth and Julian Bigelow’s study (1943) on the nature of teleological processes where the crucial idea was that what was relevant in a homeostatic process was the information return and not theenergy return via the feedback links. It is representative of the analytical approach.