Evolutionary Thinking and Knowledge Management: An Epistemological Approach to Evolution

Caio Santos Rodrigues ’16

We evolved. This is utterly a convincing sentence to attract all the attention on understanding human being and its existence. However, I have some doubts regarding obtaining the knowledge from evolutionary aspects without using very essential field in philosophy.  I am very raw and zealous life science students who try to understand all the mechanism and phenomena into the core of nature. My main material for this field is the Life and all living thing. My environment for these vital investigations is the Nature itself. Basically I am trying to learn fascinating biological events by taking into consideration non-living things as well. The evolution and medicine are the main impetus for the life scientists for decades. As Aristoteles said, every single human have an inner curiosity. This fuel to worry about our body and nature caused proposing an evolutionary explanation on human being in lieu of believing a very talented God to create all the living things in the past. I gently forced myself to think about relation between Knowledge Theory & Evolutionary Thinking. Every single knowledge packet on evolution are not always observable and most of the time we are not able to mimic all the evolutionary events that occurred millions of years ago. However, we can deduce same parameters like Natural Selection, Genetic Drift, and Random Mutations by looking these ancient clues. We are able to use computational tools to elucidate evolutionary sides of pathogen resistance against time. 

Wikipedia Commons

There are several ways and styles in order to deal with Evolutionary Thinking and these styles may contribute the knowledge management for evolutionary study fields. We can subcategorize these different ways as Typological Thinking, Population Level Thinking & Evolutionary Tree Thinking.

Plato was one of the most eminent philosophers of the ancient Greek, no doubts; he suggested theory of the Idea to categorize all the things that we know. His excellent student Aristoteles revised his master’s approach to approach categorizing the things. His proposition was the theory of Types which referred essence of things using Forms. Types materialize the essence of the thing. As a definition, If I say the apple, everyone can easily envision an apple inside of their mind. In a same manner, If I say the eukaryotic cell, every single biologist can illustrate entire structural properties and shapes of an eukaryotic cells. This 'Formal' thinking is always useful for idealizing all other things on the earth i.e the car, the tree, the cat, the socks, the door handle, the atom etc. We can summarize the ideas of Plato and Aristoteles by using simple rule: If you have seen one, you have seen them all (Stearns, S).

Nature, Riede F, 2019.

Frankly speaking, the Typological Thinking is very useful in terms of cell biology, physiology or anatomy because we are using the Forms to describe the cell, the arms & wings or the brain. We generalize these things when we say. For every cell biologist, there is a universal cell structure, if you say them the cell. Surprisingly enough, typological thinking is not the case for evolutionary thinking (most of the time). So we need different ways or style to talk about evolution.

Evolutionary thinking always tussles with variations in a population or a trait. Therefore, these variations impair our Typological Thinking style since we cannot generalize the things. For this reason, Population Thinking is a life-saving method for investigators who deal with variations in these study materials like population or any genetic traits.  This style is very beneficial anything that evolves very rapidly such as antibiotic resistance and cancer malignancy. So we can benefit from frequency distributions, probabilities and patterns of variations (Stearns, S). We do not have certainties but we have probabilities of the changing in the things over the time. This approach is very efficient style to think carcinogenesis. As most of the cancer cell had a population of clones which were made up of cancer stem cells. Every bifurcate clone is not same and for that reason we cannot generalize all the cancer cells as an identical individual.

Tree of Life, National Geographic 

Last but not least, we generally need very well defined basis while investigating problems, in our case, evolution. Justification of the problem need some reductions like first-reason, primitive thing and ancestor. In evolutionary thinking, investigator uses ancestor as basis for his/her studying material that have diverse variations. For example, we can investigate the first ancestor of the primates or first descendent that have spinal cord. We can even talk about first common ancestor of all living things. This and last style of thinking is called Tree thinking and derives a connection between species within a phylogenetic tree. This tree has some important clues to elucidate the history and changes of evolutionary events by looking at last shared ancestor. Why is drawing a tree important in terms of evolution? We are able to map two different biological properties of the species for instance correlating size of testes and brains primates. Many of scientists may use these multilateral parameters that are related to each other. As Stephan Stearns mentioned, we can construct a tree that contain knowledge (or at least information) about age and metastatic cancer. This might be crucial for early detection and life-saving.

As a conclusion, there are several ways to solve problems in evolutionary thinking. Any investigator should be able to choose the most proper way to solve his/her problem depending on type of question. However, I am very confident to say that Population & Tree Thinking are the neatest styles for coping with problems in evolution and biological changes (variations). This is just because important that Knowledge Management is immensely substantial by delving into biological problems. Wrong way selection can corrode the hale of solution behind the problem. We do not want to erode our intellectual accumulation by these parasites.

Sources

1. Stearns sc, medzhitov r. evolutionary medicine. sunderland: sinauer associates, inc; 2015.
2. İlkçağ Felsefe Tarihi 3: Aristoteles
3. Principles of Evolution, Ecology and Behavior, Open Yale Courses (https://oyc.yale.edu/ecology-and-evolutionary-biology/eeb-122)

Mustafa Ozturk

Started in: Copenhagen, 10 II 2020

Revised in: Kayseri, 10 IV 2020