The jury is still out on whether all self-maintaining tissues exploit stochastic renewal with feedback or whether some, do in fact rely on invariant asymmetric stem cell divisions. A strong prediction of the stochastic model is that even in the face of homeostasis, every stem cell pedigree has a non-zero probability of going extinct. By pedigree I refer here to a stem cell and its (non-stem cell) descendants, all of which would be doomed to disappear whenever their stem cell ancestor undergoes symmetric differentiation. In fact, periodic random extinction (balanced by an equal rate of pedigree duplication when stem cells undergo symmetric renewal) provides one of the most plausible explanations for the extremely high variability commonly seen in the sizes of stem cell-derived clones in vivo [10,11]. Other kinds of experimental data also support the occurrence of pedigree extinction, sometimes also referred to as ‘niche succession’ (see, for example, [12,13]). The main problem with such extinctions, in theory at least, is that they make it easy for pathologically ‘advantaged’ stem cells (for example, ones that have, through mutation, become faster -growing or less susceptible to feedback control) to displace normal ones. The preference for asymmetric division by stem cells that is observed in many tissues might well have arisen as a protective mechanism to minimize this effect. Put another way, the fact that stem cells very often do divide asymmetrically in no way implies that asymmetric division is the mechanism of tissue homeostasis. One can achieve homeostasis through feedback control, and still expect to see frequent (albeit not obligatory) asymmetric division, especially in tissues with rapid turnover in which stem cells must divide many times during the lifetime of the organism.