Arora Manish, Giuliani Alessandro, Curtin Paul
Department of Environmental Medicine and Public Health, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, New York, 10029, USA.
Environment and Health Department, Istituto Superiore di Sanità, Rome, 00161, Italy.
Bioessays. 2020 Nov;42(11):e2000017. doi: 10.1002/bies.202000017. Epub 2020 Aug 26.
The environment impacts human health in profound ways, yet few theories define the form of the relationship between human physiology and the environment. It is conjectured that such complex systems cannot interact directly, but rather their interaction requires the formation of an intermediary "interface." This position contrasts with current epidemiological constructs of causation, which implicitly assume that two complex systems transfer information directly while remaining separate entities. Further, it is contended that dynamic, process-based interfaces incorporate components from all the interacting systems but exhibit operational independence. This property has many consequences, the foremost being that characteristics of the interface cannot be fully resolved by only studying the systems involved in the interaction. The interface itself must be the subject of inquiry. Without refocusing the attention on biodynamic interfaces, how the environment impacts health cannot be discerned. Also see the video abstract here https://youtu.be/XeyjeZeyo4o.
环境对人类健康有着深远影响,但很少有理论能界定人类生理与环境之间关系的形式。据推测,这样的复杂系统无法直接相互作用,而是它们的相互作用需要形成一个中介“界面”。这一观点与当前流行病学的因果关系构建形成对比,后者隐含地假定两个复杂系统在保持各自独立实体的同时直接传递信息。此外,有人认为基于过程的动态界面包含了所有相互作用系统的组成部分,但具有操作上的独立性。这一特性有许多后果,其中最重要的是仅通过研究相互作用中涉及的系统无法完全解析界面的特征。界面本身必须成为研究对象。如果不将注意力重新聚焦于生物动力学界面,则无法弄清环境如何影响健康。另请见此处的视频摘要https://youtu.be/XeyjeZeyo4o 。