| Negative feedback has become ubiquitous in science both as a technique and as a conceptual tool. As a technique, negative feedback has a long history; devices based in its use were made in antiquity. It has only been during the last century, however, that rigorous quantitative methods have become associated with the applications of negative feedback. These methods originated in communications engineering and during the World War II period spread rapidly to other areas of science where further applications were soon made. During this process of dissemination negative feedback was transformed into a powerful conceptual tool, of general application, having to do with the organization of behavior.;Wiener, Arturo Rosenblueth, and Julian Bigelow were the authors of the 1943 paper, "Behavior, Purpose and Teleology," which stimulated a number of interdisciplinary meetings. These meetings were important in spreading the feedback concepts to different disciplines. Participating in the meetings were, among others, Gregory Bateson, Wolfgang Kohler, Margaret Mead, Warren S. McCulloch, F. S. C. Northrop and John von Neumann. The climate for the successful assimilation of negative feedback at these meetings was made considerably more receptive by concurrent developments in computer science, neurophysiology and servomechanism theory.;The role and significance of negative feedback in scientific research have not yet been fully identified. A research program of "cybernetic analysis," based in negative feedback, is proposed to facilitate an understanding of this role. The program shows that negative feedback can provide an explanation for adaptive goal-directed behavior in both living and non-living systems. Cybernetic analysis thus provides a bridge between holistic and reductionistic explanation, and allows a scientific recognition of goal-directedness in nature. Previously, goal-directedness had been associated with teleology which, due to a lack of a mechanistic foundation, had become scientifically illegitimate.;The central figure responsible for both the dissemination and transformation of negative feedback was the American mathematician, Norbert Wiener, who, as a child prodigy, had developed graduate level proficiency in science, mathematics and philosophy before he was twenty. Wiener's multidisciplinary background and interests were critically important in allowing him to interact with professionals in many different fields and thereby to disseminate the feedback ideas. |
