Ashby's Law can be seen as an application of the principle of selective variety. However, a frequently cited stronger formulation of Ashby's Law, "the variety in the control system must be equal to or larger than the variety of the perturbations in order to achieve control", which ignores the constant factor K, does not hold in general. Indeed, the underlying "only variety can destroy variety" assumption is in contradiction with the principle of asymmetric transitions which implies that spontaneous decrease of variety is possible (which is precisely what buffering does). For example, a bacterium searching for food and avoiding poisons has a minimal variety of only two actions: increase or decrease the rate of random movements. Yet, it is capable to cope with a quite complex environment, with many different types of perturbations and opportunities. Its blind "transitions" are normally sufficient to find a favourable situation, thus escaping all dangers.