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“Consensus Within Diversity”: An Evolutionary Perspective on Local Medical Systems

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Abstract

Evidence shows that knowledge concerning medicinal plants is heterogeneous, as the majority of people in a medical system know only a few plants. This heterogeneity may make sense from an adaptive viewpoint, as human beings tend to keep a small set of information that offers adaptive advantages because our brains can store limited amounts of data. From this scenario, we developed the structural core concept for medical systems: a group of medicinal plants with adaptive characteristics that affect the structure and function of medical systems. We created a set of hypotheses based on the structural core concept to guide future studies investigating the structure and dynamics of local medical systems. Concerning the dynamics of medical systems, we suggest that the structural core is the part of the system that changes least over time, i.e., it is the most conservative. Thus, we can expect that species substitution events mainly occur outside of the structural core. From the medical system structure, we indicate that core plants tend to be favored in the transmission of knowledge. These plants also serve as a model for the selection of novel medicinal plants and are therefore an important factor for the medical system structure. Analysis of the structural core can help the understanding of the structure and dynamics of medical systems and can aid future bioprospecting studies, which can search for plants with pharmacological potential using the structural core.

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Acknowledgments

We thank the Brazilian Federal Agency for the Support and Evaluation of Graduate Education/Federal Universities Restructuring and Expansion (Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior/Restruturação da Expansão das Universidades Federais—CAPES/REUNI) program for the doctoral fellowship provided to WSF, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico—CNPq) for the research fellowship and financial support to UPA, and the members of the Laboratory of Applied and Theoretical Ethnobiology of the Rural Federal University of Pernambuco (Laboratório de Etnobiologia Aplicada e Teórica/Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco—LEA/UFRPE) for discussions that helped us reflect on the ideas in this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Applied and Theoretical Ethnobiology, Department of Biology, Federal Rural University of Pernambuco, Recife, PE, Brazil

    Washington Soares Ferreira Júnior & Ulysses Paulino Albuquerque

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  1. Washington Soares Ferreira Júnior
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  2. Ulysses Paulino Albuquerque
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Correspondence to Ulysses Paulino Albuquerque.

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Ferreira Júnior, W.S., Albuquerque, U.P. “Consensus Within Diversity”: An Evolutionary Perspective on Local Medical Systems. Biol Theory 10, 363–368 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13752-015-0215-1

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