Abstract
Following a common practice in medicine, biomedical researches tend to view various disease conditions as direct results of preceding, disease-causing events. Such events are commonly those that could have been previously detected and which have given the history of studies of particular diseases, been previously recognized as playing an important role in an onset and/or progression of the disease in question. Although such practice is justified from the very principles of experimental investigation and scientific observation, it comes short of finding the fundamental causes behind these disease conditions. This manuscript proposes a different view to the origin of some types of diseases as well as some other biological phenomena. Namely, the focus of the concept relates to a notion of survival determinism, proposed to have been in the very core of evolution of primordial organisms. Thereby, as various disease models are discussed in the light of the proposed mechanisms for adaptation, they could be seen as relicts of the early evolutionary history of life on Earth.
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Notes
Initially introduced by Charles Darwin in the book titled: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life (1859).
The neutral theory of molecular evolution was introduced in the late 1960 and 1970s by Motoo Kimura to address the question of vast genomic differences between different species which are selectively neutral.
Teleology (from Greek telos standing for end, purpose) refers to the study of purpose of natural phenomena.
The prefix ur-(from Old German) refers to proto, original, earliest.
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Krsmanovic, P. Fundamental paradox of survival determinism: the ur-etiology disease paradigm. Theory Biosci. 132, 65–71 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-012-0169-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12064-012-0169-9