Nuño de la Rosa Laura
IAS-Research Group, University of the Basque Country, San Sebastian, Spain.
J Exp Zool B Mol Dev Evol. 2017 Jul;328(5):395-411. doi: 10.1002/jez.b.22741. Epub 2017 May 10.
Since the late 1970s, the field of evolutionary biology has undergone empirical and theoretical developments that have threaten the pillars of evolutionary theory. Some evolutionary biologists have recently argued that evolutionary biology is not experiencing a paradigm shift, but an expansion of the modern synthesis. Philosophers of biology focusing on scientific practices seem to agree with this pluralistic interpretation and have argued that evolutionary theory should rather be seen as an organized network of multiple problem agendas with diverse disciplinary contributors. In this paper, I apply a computational analysis to study the dynamics and conceptual structure of one of the main emerging problem agendas in evolutionary biology: evolvability. I have used CiteSpace, an application for visualizing and analyzing trends and patterns in scientific literature that applies cocitation analysis to identify scientific specialities. I analyze the main clusters of the evolvability cocitation network with the aim to identify the main research lines and the interdisciplinary relationships that structure this research front. I then compare these results with the existing classifications of evolvability concepts, and identify four main conceptual tensions within the definitions of evolvability. Finally, I argue that there is a lot of usefulness in the inconsistency in which the term evolvability is used in biological research. I claim that evolvability research has set up "trading zones" in biology that make possible interdisciplinary exchanges.
自20世纪70年代末以来，进化生物学领域经历了实证和理论发展，这些发展对进化理论的支柱构成了威胁。一些进化生物学家最近认为，进化生物学并非正在经历范式转变，而是现代综合理论的扩展。关注科学实践的生物学哲学家似乎认同这种多元解读，并认为进化理论更应被视为一个由多个问题议程组成的有组织网络，有着不同学科的贡献者。在本文中，我运用计算分析来研究进化生物学中一个主要新兴问题议程——可进化性——的动态和概念结构。我使用了CiteSpace，这是一个用于可视化和分析科学文献趋势及模式的应用程序，它运用共被引分析来识别科学专业领域。我分析了可进化性共被引网络的主要聚类，目的是识别构成这一研究前沿的主要研究方向和跨学科关系。然后，我将这些结果与现有的可进化性概念分类进行比较，并在可进化性的定义中识别出四个主要的概念张力。最后，我认为生物学研究中使用“可进化性”一词时存在的不一致性有很多益处。我声称可进化性研究在生物学中建立了“交易区”，使跨学科交流成为可能。
