The concept of ‘homoiostasis’ is now a central one in many sciences and its widespread use and utility attests to the genius of the American physiologist Walter Cannon, to whom we owe the original insight. Cannon coined the term in 1929 and defined homeostasis homeostasis as ‘ … the coordinated physiological processes which maintain most of the steady states in the organism’ (Cannon, 1929). He then went on to employ it with great success in his later books and publications (see Cannon, 1939) and the concept is now a central one in biology as well as in other fields such as engineering, economics and information technology. The idea of a process of self-regulation is based, however, on the earlier studies and speculations of the great French physiologist Claude Bernard, who first suggested that animals regulate and hold constant an internal state or milieu intérieur that is quite different from that of the environment around them. As he states in his famous textbook of ‘lessons’ published in Paris in 1878

The more recent concept of an idea, or theory, functioning as a paradigm comes from the work of the American philosopher Thomas Kuhn, who coined this term to describe the way in which whole scientific communities suddenly change the way in which they interpret and describe phenomena.