[From Matti Kolu (2014.01.20.1300 CET)]
Martin Taylor 2014.01.20.00.12--
If anyone knows anything about Bayliss or about his Living Control Systems, please chime in.
I have a copy of the book. I am posting the preface as it is fairly interesting.
(Typed, not copied, so the typos are mine.)
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The author of this book, Leonard Bayliss, died in August 1964. For
many years, up to 1959, he had worked incessantly in producing, in two
volumes, a new edition of his father's great work, _Principles of
General Physiology_, published first in 1915. In his patience, his
helpfulness, and his inexhaustible knowledge, he was singularly like
W.M.B.; and the company of physiologists everywhere is greatly
indebted to him for preserving his father's thought and extending it
in more modern guise for a further many years.
When Bayliss had finished this major task his mind went back to things
in which he had been active during the war. From 1940 to 1945 he was
an important member of the Army Operational Research Group, and had
been concerned with the control of anti-aircraft guns and their
accessory instruments. As he points out on p. 7 it was only in 1930
that a rigorous theoretical study had begun on how automatic control
systems work and how they should be designed.
Naturally, as he saw these systems develop rapidly during the war, he
reflected on their many counterparts in living systems where they had
evolved slowly, to supreme perfection, over hundreds of millions of
years. So when he returned to physiology be began to put together this
thoughts on the subject and between 1960 and 1964 devoted much of his
time writing them down. Fortunately the work had already been
completed when he died.
It is no new idea that living organisms contain numerous
self-regulating control systems but we are only now beginning to
understand the factors that govern the sensitivity, speed of response
and stability of these elaborate mechanisms. An immense fields still
awaits exploration here both by biologists who acquire a suficient
understanding of the theory of automatic mechanisms that has been
developed by engineers, and by people trained as engineers or
mathematicians who come to realise what a fascinating variety of
"living control systems" are waiting to be investigated.
In a letter to sir Graham Sutton, General Editor of this series,
Bayliss wrote that, when writing this book he "had in mind that its
reader might be, primarily, at the level of the sixth form at schools
and the first year at Universities whose training had been either on
the mathematico-physical side or on the biological side; and secondly
some more advanced students in experimental biology and engineering".
This statement is characteristic of Bayliss's modesty, and in his
generosity of estimating the abilities of the young: in addition to
its value at the level that he mentions, this book will bring a new
order of understanding of living things to a wide range of general
readers with some training in physical or biological science, and
indeed will also be an admirable introduction for established research
workers who wish to enter this field from either the biological or
engineering side.
Bayliss also recognized the difficulty of writing for two groups of
readers: "this implies that one half of the readers will find some
parts of the book familiar and possibly unnecessary and the other half
will find the other part to be equally amiliar and unnecessary". But
there cannot be many biologists who are familiar with all the examples
from the animal and vegetable worls that he brings forward, and on the
other side, few but the servo experts will fail to benefit from the
lucid account of control theory that is given here.
A. V. HILL
A. F. HUXLEY
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Matti